


nothing stays buried

by kosy



Series: conjugates [2]
Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Complicated Relationships, Established Relationship, F/F, Godfights, He/Him Butch Lesbian Kennedy Loser, Moral Ambiguity, POV Second Person, Relationship Study, Season 9-Season 12, Unreliable Narrator, i know it's a little overdone but give it a shot, sequel to oceanographer's choice, they are all so traumatized. blaseball sucks, this is true in like. every fic of mine but it's worth reiterating w jaylen here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 23:00:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29750331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: You burn. At the end of the day, it always seems to come back to that.
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers & Sutton Dreamy & Mike Townsend, Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Sutton Dreamy
Series: conjugates [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2111742
Comments: 12
Kudos: 15





	nothing stays buried

**Author's Note:**

> hi everyone! BOY this took me a minute, i've been working on it since mid-january, but it's finally here just in time for the Great Return!
> 
> EDIT: FORGOT TO ADD THAT THIS IS VERY MUCH A SEQUEL LOL IT WILL MAKE A LOT MORE SENSE IF YOU READ OCEANOGRAPHER'S CHOICE, THE FIRST WORK IN THIS SERIES 
> 
> content warnings on this one are pretty hefty, but it's worth reiterating that i'm not doing any of this just to shock or upset anyone—i'm just trying to tell a story, and this isn't trauma porn. that being said, warnings for blood and gore, descriptions of panic attacks, murder, and character death, plus maincord-prohibited swearing and referenced sexual content. let me know if you think anything should be added. also let me know if you find any issues; i'm the only one who read this over before posting!
> 
> tremendous thanks to everyone who supported me throughout this process, esp @tenworms. also, shoutout to mads @crookedsaint (on here; they're socksmaybe on tumblr) for writing the song that mike sings partway through the fic; they're immensely talented and i adore them.
> 
> title from the mountain goats' "southwood plantation road", because i am who i am.
> 
> i think that's it! please enjoy, and thank you so much for reading.

You burn. At the end of the day, it always seems to come back to that. 

You have burned. You are burning. You will never be anything but burning. You crumble to ash and you drift away on the wind and people write songs about it. You are memorialized aflame. You will burn again. 

You hold onto her as tightly as you can, and you burn anyway. 

* * *

The drive home from Charleston is long and quiet. 

You were going to stay the night in a hotel in the city, attend the postseason party the Crabs had planned. It was supposed to be a celebration. But by the end of the game—the battle—the only thing either of you had wanted to do was sleep in your own bed. 

So instead, you had walked out of the stadium together without speaking, her hand clasped in yours, and climbed into her car, you in the passenger’s seat and her in the driver’s. 

It’s a five hour drive from Charleston up to Baltimore, and she doesn’t talk, so you don’t try to either. 

The sun went down a long time ago, but Sutton doesn’t waver. Her hands rest solid and unfaltering on the wheel. You almost wish she would cry or shake or scream or even just _look_ over at you, but she gazes straight ahead at the double yellow lines and flicks on her turn signal and passes another car, maintains her custom five miles per hour over the speed limit. You love her for her steadiness as much as you fear her for it. 

She isn’t trembling, no, but you are. You hate it with a stupid, helpless ferocity. Your whole body shakes no matter how hard you clench your fists or breathe deep or just furiously will yourself into stillness. Eventually you stop trying, relax your body as much as you can despite it. Shitty compromise. 

She’s watching the road but you’re looking at her. The curve of her jaw, the deep brown of her eyes, the gentle slope of her nose, the cloud of tight curls around her head, the lines of her neck, the bones of her fingers where they shift minutely on the steering wheel. 

Every detail is familiar, but you catalogue each feature like it’s your first time seeing it. It’s an old habit. Picked it up sometime during season seven. You took every part of her and turned it over in your hands, and in this way you taught yourself to breathe again. 

Dreamy glances over at you somewhere in Virginia and whatever she sees in your face, it makes her take her scarred right hand off the wheel, place it on top of yours. Unquestioning, you flip your hand over instantly and lace your fingers together, and they slot as ever into the shiny-smooth patches of skin where you burned her eight years ago. It’s a strange kind of comfort but it’s still comfort, and something in your lungs finally uncatches. 

“Are you okay?” she asks haltingly. It’s the first time she’s spoken in hours, and her voice rasps on its way out. 

You hum something like an affirmative, then add, “Yeah, I’m fine,” for good measure. When the question occurs to you a moment later, you ask, “You?” She nods, squeezes your hand once. And of course you’re not fine, neither of you are fine, but you’re not-fine in a way you know how to survive, and you’re not-fine together, and that’ll have to be close enough. 

* * *

The moon comes in through the curtains. One of the two bodies stirs. 

“Jay? Are you asleep?” 

“No. I… you know.” 

“Yes. I do.” 

“Just can’t sleep.” 

“Me neither.” 

“Wanna get up then? I went shopping, like, a week ago, so I’m pretty sure we still have stuff for coffee. And caffeinated tea, if you’re not feeling coffee.” 

“Sweetheart, it’s four in the morning.” 

“Well it’s not like we’re sleeping.” 

A sigh. “No, I know, but I—” 

“Yeah?” 

The pauses stretches out long. You wait. Finally:

“Could you just hold me? It doesn’t have to be for long or anything and if you want to get up, I understand that, I just want—” 

“I—yeah, Dreams, of course. C’mere.” 

You roll to face her fully and you open your arms and she folds herself in, winding an arm around your waist and laying her head on your chest. You feel her shudder out a long breath against your collarbone, fingers digging in just a moment where they’re resting on your spine, and you pull her closer. 

You still don’t get any sleep. She doesn’t either. Like this, with her head resting over your heart and your hand spread out over the skin between her shoulderblades, neither of you can really bring yourself to care. 

* * *

That morning your muscles burn, restless. So you run. 

It was the first thing you did when you came back to life, _really_ came back to life. You hadn’t been watching the game on Ruby Tuesday but you’d known instantly what had happened. The lethargy, the haze, the acrid smell of smoke, it all lifted just a little. Not nearly enough. But after six months spent as a ghost, a guest in the living world, you felt air pour into your lungs. That heady restless energy was there, suddenly, that unnameable thing you’d been searching for, so you ran. 

You probably went miles through the streets of Baltimore that day, dizzying incomprehensible loops. You weren’t keeping track. People blurred grey into the buildings and the buildings blurred grey into the sky. 

You ran until you couldn’t run any longer, until you remembered you weren’t dead, until you felt the blood in your veins again. Ran yourself breathless and nameless. And you still went home needing—

Needing anything you could get. You were a creature of need that unending summer. You needed fire and words and noise and joy and terror and fury and touch. Your starvation was all-encompassing, and you devoured whatever scraps you were thrown. 

You aren’t like that anymore. You don’t need what you needed then. Or you’re trying not to. It’s just sense memory these days: your feet hitting the ground, desperation rising in your throat and the muscles of your legs itching like something inside is trying to claw its way out. The actual necessity is worn and faded, thinning old fabric beneath your fingers. Now you run only because you like to run, because you always have.

_I’m not like that anymore,_ you think. _I don’t need what I needed then._ The thought is unfamiliar and doesn’t feel entirely yours, and you stop at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to turn. You check for your pulse, fingertips to sweaty skin, and it’s there. Fast and thunderous. But for the first time in two years, there isn’t anything pressing heavy on your spine in return, and for the first time in eight years, you don’t smell smoke. 

You laugh aloud, a breathless burst of noise. The light changes and you cross the street, still laughing deliriously, and pick up into a run again. You thought you had killed any hope left in you years ago. 

* * *

So: no more Debt. You don't owe shit to the gods or anyone else. You check your own stats page when you get home and confirm as much. There’s still a risk of being returned to the Void at the end of every season, and you’re still flickering, but you aren’t in Debt. It’s. Something, at least. 

But this is blaseball so that’s not it. It’s never it. 

* * *

“How much of an eye have you been keeping on the fan side of things this season?” Sutton asks from her perch at the kitchen island. She’s idly tracing the granite countertop with her fingernail, but the rest of her body is held carefully still.

It’s so false-casual that you have to bite back a sigh before you respond. “Not much. No cryptic bullshit with the idolboard to worry about.” You pull a tomato from a bowl on the counter, set it down on the cutting board, and start slicing it, just for something to do with your hands; you’ll figure out how to work it into the recipe later. “And yeah, I figure I’m fucked if the Thieves get hit with Kill Your Darling—’cause I’m definitely the most idolized player on the team, no question—but none of the other blessings are really, like, my problem.” Mostly you zero in on the deadly shit or the ones that’ll tank your stats, and other than that you don’t worry. You don’t have either the time or the agency for fear. 

“The Garages are gunning hard for the Out of Sight blessing,” she tells you, unreadable.

You go still, vegetable knife still poised over the tomato you were slicing seconds earlier. “That’s the one that drags two pitchers out of the shadows.” In your head that had been a question, but it comes out flat. You know the answer. You know why they’re doing it.

“They’re trying to get Mike back,” Dreamy answers anyway. And you probably should’ve seen that coming months ago, but.

“What the fuck,” you say. 

* * *

You watch the elections in Charleston with the rest of the league. The crowd’s antsy. You’re antsy too, but you aren’t stupid enough to show it. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see all the fancy TV cameras for the countless splorts networks that have cropped up over the last decade. They keep panning over to you like they’re gonna catch you doing—what, exactly? You don’t know and either way you don’t give them anything. 

The Commissioner takes his position behind the podium. Decree results are read out—the next season’s weather is all endless birds and blooddrains and solar eclipses, and you’re fucking exhausted just thinking about it—and then it’s on to the Blessings. 

You keep your expression bored. Flat. You know how you want to come off to the cameras so you play the role, fold your arms and keep your blaseball cap tugged low over your face, stare out into the field as the results flash across the scoreboard in time with the Commissioner’s recitation. 

Still. You pay attention. Some teams will have to run a fifth base next season. The Steaks get hit with Kill Your Darlings, so there goes August Mina. Her team’s smart enough to scatter before she goes up in smoke. You’d’ve thought it’d be Allison Abbott, but you guess Allie gets to live another day. Maybe people just care less than they used to or maybe the Steaks fans rallied and decided to all pick Mina as their idol, made sure she was the one to go instead of someone they liked better. Either way, lucky break. 

People get their abilities upped a little or hacked down a little. Nothing too wild. Typical blaseball shit. They leave Out of Sight for last, though. Plenty’s changed over the last decade, but the gods still have their flair for the dramatic. 

The Commissioner squints down at the paper he’s reading the results off of. “Uh,” he says. “Weird little mix-up here. Some batters are in this one. Oops. You’ll be fine. I’m sure you’ll like them too.” The crowd shifts uneasily. The Commissioner continues. “Out of Sight has blessed the Garages.” A cursory cheer goes through the crowd, but it quiets down fast. Not over yet. “Nolanestophia Patterson retreats to the shadows. Mcdowell Karim emerges. Mcdowell Karim retreats to the shadows. Sparks Beans emerges.”

“Where are the pitchers?” someone shouts from the stands. One of the Mills or a fan of theirs, it looks like. They’re shushed.

The Commissioner glares flatly into the crowd, waiting for thousands of people to settle into total silence before speaking again. He sighs heavily. “Ortiz Morse retreats to the shadows. Mike Townsend emerges.” 

The crowd explodes into screams so loud that you flinch in spite of yourself, swearing. Nobody notices. Someone’s already blasting “Mike Townsend (Is A Credit To The Team)” from a speaker they must’ve lugged in, and even the Shoe Thieves are on their feet screeching along. You want to kill somebody, sort of, but you lost that capability two years ago so you guess you’re just fuckin’ stuck now. 

“Lori Boston retreats to the shadows. Lenny Marijuana emerges,” the Commissioner mutters before turning off the mic, but nobody’s listening to him anymore. You crane your neck to see over the fists thrust into the air, the leaping crush of bodies, and yep—there’s Mike, same as he’d always been before, scruffy and kinda twiggy and unsure of what to do with any amount of positive attention. 

He’s just standing by the home team dugout with his hands shoved awkwardly into his pockets, like he’s been there all along. It occurs to you, uncomfortably, that maybe he has. 

* * *

Your Debt’s gone now, sure, but new icons replace it on your stats page once the election results come out. Normalcy is the hilltop and you’re fucking Sisyphus. You don’t know what the boulder is here—metaphors have never been your strong suit—but you know that you hate it. 

At any rate, the kneeling-you with the knife in her back is gone but in its place is a face downcast and the head of a bird. Ever since the godfight there's been something wrong with your pitching, every few throws spinning out wild when you practice no matter how hard you try. And crows have taken to following you through the streets of Baltimore. Just a few at a time, enough to be a coincidence if you were anybody else, but it isn't and you're not. You connect the dots. 

The new icons go next to the old icons for Flickering and Returned, right above your stats. Mild pitching. Friend of Crows. Flickering. Returned. One point five star batter, four star pitcher, one point five star baserunner, two point five star defender. Everything you are fits into a single page on your phone screen. If nothing else, you've gotta appreciate the convenience. 

* * *

You don’t call Mike, once he’s out of the shadows. 

You know you should, you aren’t stupid, you know he deserves a text at the very least. But you board the flight from Charleston to Baltimore with Dreamy, and you drive her Corolla from BWI back to the apartment, and you make dinner while she showers, and your phone’s right there in your back pocket the whole time, and you still don’t call Mike. 

“Why haven’t you called Mike yet?” Dreamy asks from behind you, and you jump about a foot in the air and almost drop a pot of boiling water. 

“Jesus _Christ,”_ you snap. “Some fuckin’ warning next time, maybe?” 

“Sorry,” she tells you, not sounding very sorry. Her expression’s mostly neutral, but her lips are pulling sideways just enough for you to know she thinks she’s hilarious. 

You sigh, then offer her a shrug. “I dunno. Giving him time to settle in. He doesn’t need to hear from me. He’s got plenty of other shit going on. Like, they’re already writing the fourth installment in his fuckin’ song series, seriously, I don’t have a source on that but I’ve known Teddy since college and—”

“You sold his apartment when you came back,” she points out. “You kind of owe him a call.” 

“I thought he was going to stay dead,” you mutter, setting the pot back down on the stove. “Figured I’d do him a favor.” The pasta’s gonna be overcooked now, probably. Shit. 

“Tell Mike that, not me,” she says. “Also, bold assumption coming from you. That he’d stay...” She waves a hand to convey the general who-the-fuck-knows of the Shadowed players’ states of being. Dead? Deadish. Dead-adjacent. You sure haven’t asked any of them. Whatever it was, Mike was it for three years. 

“I thought I was the only one.” You don’t like how quiet your voice has gone, how uncertain. You clear your throat. “I didn’t think other people would—I dunno. I thought it was just me, that’s all.” 

Something about it shakes you. The fact that the deal could be undone, that it _was_ undone. You don’t claim to know shit about what’s fair and what isn’t, but you’re certain that a balance somewhere has been thrown. 

“Hey, there’ve been Shadow transactions before,” Dreamy says, nudging her shoulder against yours. “It’s not… you know. The world won’t fall apart because he came back. He was traded for somebody else. Fair and square.” 

_He was supposed to stay,_ some part of you insists anyway, but you shake it off. 

“I should call him,” you admit. 

“No shit,” she says. “I’ll finish the noodles.” 

“You sure?” you ask, but she’s already turning her back on you to pull a colander out of the cupboard, take the pot off the stove, and head for the sink. You hesitate, lingering by the stove, but she waves you away, so you tell yourself you’ll make dinner tomorrow and you skulk off into the bedroom and you close the door behind you. 

The walls in the apartment are thin as hell, but at least now Dreamy can reasonably pretend she doesn’t hear you. As soon as you have the thought, though, some unidentifiable soft indie shit starts playing in the kitchen, and even from here you can tell that she’s singing along quietly. She’s still just trying to help. Something in your chest stutters, like you’ve missed a step coming down the stairs. 

You let out a long breath, take your phone out of your back pocket, and dial. You’ve got his number memorized. You have since he got his first cell phone on his fifteenth birthday. 

He picks up on the third ring, just long enough for you to get nervous about it. “Hello?” His tone is guarded, not that you really blame him. 

“How’s it going, man?” you say, same phone call opener you’ve been using with him since you were fifteen too. 

Mike just laughs, bitter and incredulous. “I don’t—holy _shit,_ Jaylen, it’s been hours and I _know_ you were at the election readout, I saw you with the Thieves—” 

“I thought I’d give you some fuckin’ space,” you snap, and maybe it’s bait but you’re rising to it anyway. “God knows I could’ve fucking used it when I got resurrected. They were already writing a concept album about me the second they dragged my ass up out of hell—”

“I’m the one who dragged you out of hell,” he says, quiet. “Not them.” 

You exhale and walk to the window and stare down into the street, the cars passing by below. Make an effort to soften your voice for him. “Yeah, you did. Listen, Mike—”

“I’m not arguing about this shit over the phone,” he mutters. Maybe not bait, then. 

“Okay, so come to Baltimore,” you tell him, picking at the edge of the windowsill. The uneven paint job scrapes away under your thumbnail. 

“Fucking _Baltimore?”_

You snort. “No offense, but you couldn’t pay me to go back to Seattle.” 

“No, I know, I get it given everything, but—Baltimore? I thought you were on the Thieves now. I didn’t miss something there, right?” Your stomach sinks, and Mike realizes at the same moment you do. “I—wait. Hang on. You’re still with Sutton?”

“You don’t have to sound so fuckin’ shocked.” 

That same harsh laugh from earlier. “From what I’ve been told, you killed twelve p—actually, even disregarding all that, you can’t hold down a relationship for more than six fucking _months_ much less eight years, and the half decade of on-again off-again bullshit with Allison Abbott _does not count—”_

“I thought you said you weren’t gonna do this over the phone,” you interrupt, pinching the bridge of your nose because you think that’s supposed to relieve tension. It isn’t doing shit for you but just the act of making the right human gesture here feels like it should mean something. “Come to Baltimore, Mike. Plenty of offseason left. We can, you know, catch up.” 

There’s a pause, and you’re about to ask if he’s still there when he speaks again. 

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” If he’s trying not to sound agitated, he’s doing a bad job of it. “You died and she showed up to help get your stuff out of the apartment and she said you’d been dating for months, and I didn’t even know who she _was,_ Jay.” 

_“That’s_ what you’re pissed at me about?” Your nail scratches weirdly over the wood of the windowsill and you wince at the texture. 

He chuckles, dry. “That’s just what’s easiest. I’m pissed at you about a lot of things.” 

“Yeah. Well. Join the club. I hear they have t-shirts.” He doesn’t laugh at that, but then again you weren’t really expecting him to. 

Another pause, then: “You’re covering my plane ticket.” 

“Fine,” you say, the beginnings of relief sparking warm in your chest.

“I’ll get the next flight I can,” he adds, begrudging. “I’m not sleeping on Teddy’s couch any longer than I have to.” 

You snicker. “Yeah. Sorry about selling the apartment.” You’d tried going back there in season seven, just for a night, just because you happened to be in town, but it was all wrong. The cats were gone, and the couch wasn’t in its old place, and somebody had finally managed to fix the curtain rod in your bedroom so it wasn’t toppling over every few days in the middle of the night. The grounds of Mike’s last coffee were still in the sink. He had a half-finished book on his nightstand. 

You’d spent an afternoon packing up the last of his shit and tossing it in storage, and then you sold the place and never looked back. Stayed in hotels whenever you were in Seattle for a series after that; you have the money to spare so you might as well. A door, closed. Except here’s Mike, testing the handle, and it isn’t like you ever bothered to change the locks. 

“Yeah, bitch move there. You better not have sold our guitar too.” 

“I didn’t.” You would never. 

He sighs, and you can feel all the fight go out of him from thousands of miles away. “Good.” Not as talkative as he used to be, but you figure that’s fine. You aren’t either, really.  
  


“See you,” you offer after the pause stretches out just a little too long to be natural. 

“Yeah,” he says, and hangs up. An ambulance siren wails out in the street, and you try not to twitch at the sudden noise. 

* * *

The first thing Mike does when he catches sight of you from across the terminal a week later is freeze. He just stops walking. The people behind him crash into him, nearly topple him over, and you can see his lips forming an absentminded apology but he doesn’t look away from you even for a second, and then he’s half-running, suitcase dragged behind him. You watch him charge at you for a few more moments before you belatedly realize that _oh, shit, he’s_ actually _charging,_ and by then he’s shoving you back with his free hand. 

You stumble backward a few steps. “Jesus, dude, are you _good?”_ He advances on you further but you don’t retreat again, just cross your arms and stare him down. It was a pretty lame shove in the first place. You love the guy but you know he doesn’t have the guts for a real fistfight. Can’t even stomach the sight of blood. And there are some lines neither of you will cross, at least not with each other. 

“What the _fuck?”_ he demands, stopping right in front of you. 

You sigh. “Is this about the murders?” 

His jaw drops, and you have to fight the urge to laugh in spite of yourself. “What do y—of course it’s about the fucking murders, Jaylen, are you _diseased?_ Did you get dropped on your fucking _head_ sometime in the last few years? Holy _shit!_ You _killed people!”_

“Yeah! I did! Stop fuckin’ yelling at me about it in the middle of the airport!” you hiss. Heads are already turning your direction, and you do _not_ want this shit on Twitter. 

He’s opening his mouth, probably to yell at you again, but then he looks around and seems to think better of it. “Fine! Fine. Fine. Let’s go.” He turns on his heel and marches toward the exit, and you follow, expression blank and hands shoved into the pockets of your leather jacket. People keep staring anyway. You’re both too goddamn recognizable these days. 

As soon as the two of you are in the car, he’s back at it. “Moody Cookbook, Elijah Bates, Mclaughlin Scorpler, Antonio Wallace, Dominic Marijuana, Murray Pony, Sebastian Telephone—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” you say, starting the car, and Mike’s briefly cut off by a concerning groan from the engine as it turns over. 

“—Yazmin Mason, Frasier Shmurmgle, Workman Gloom, Boyfriend Monreal, Miguel Wheeler,” he finishes. “Twelve people—” 

“It was two years ago, Mike,” you tell him. “Everyone’s over it by now. Also, did you have that shit _memorized?”_

He ignores the question and just barrels on. “No, they aren’t over it! Literally _nobody_ is! You _killed people!”_

“Yeah, and blaseball moves _fast,_ and there’s nothing anyone can fucking _do_ about it now, including me, so—” 

You go around and around like that for hours, a snake devouring its own tail into infinity, and you resign yourself to the fight. You argue the whole drive home and all the way up the stairs to Dreamy’s apartment and and for hours standing on opposite sides of the living room. You’re glad Dreamy’s at practice, and you text her as discreetly as you can to maybe take a detour coming home, ‘cause you don’t know how long this is gonna last and all you can do is ride it out. And you don’t want her to see either of you like this, him borderline screaming and you watching blank-faced and numb, leaned up against the wall. You can barely feel your back pressed to its surface. 

Mike’s an angry crier, cheeks red and wet as he demands to know what exactly you did and how and why, and how you could have done it all, and how anybody could stand to stay at your side after that, and _what, seriously, is_ wrong _with you, Jaylen, what the fuck is_ wrong _with you?_

You don’t have any answers he wants to hear, you know that, but you offer them up anyway. You’re more than experienced with the questions themselves, have heard them at length from people way more violent and way more furious than him. You’ve been beaten for your answers. You’ve bled for them. 

Why did you do it? Because you wanted to live. 

You’d say sorry, but you know you aren’t as sorry as anyone wants you to be, and nothing they can say or do will make you sorry enough. 

Two years later, nobody really cares that much anyway. There are a few exceptions out there, sure, the ones who actually lost someone, but mostly people hate you for what you did just because they think they still should. A+ for effort, or whatever the fuck.

The sun goes down over Baltimore and sometime around then Mike finally yells himself out, hoarse-throated and exhausted. You can’t imagine he’s been sleeping much anyway; God knows you didn’t when you got back from the dead. 

“Get some water, dipshit,” you tell him as soon as the silence is long enough to warrant it. “You’re all fucked up.” 

He scrubs at his face with his palms. “Fuck you,” he rasps, but his heart isn’t in it. He drops his hands to his sides and laughs roughly. “God. You were just waiting for me to be done, weren’t you?” 

“Yeah,” you say. “Pretty much.” You answered his questions in as few words as possible and mostly let him go in circles about it, rambling and recontextualizing and reframing the questions until he had nothing left in him. Again: you’re used to this. You know how it goes by now. The fact is that you are alive. You aren’t going away. The only thing anybody can do now is learn to deal with it. 

Mike exhales hard and treks over to the kitchen. “Where’re the water glasses?” 

“First cabinet to the right of the sink.” 

“Thanks.” 

“Mhm.” You watch him fill the glass up, then chug half of it. He tips his head back, presses the heel of his hand to his forehead, and you sigh. “Need an Ibluprofen?” 

“That’d be nice.” A beat. “You know, I gave my _life_ for you and twelve people died because of that. It’s on me.” 

You lift a shoulder, let it fall again. “Sucks, yeah, but you didn’t know that’d happen when you did it. So. Not your fault. Plus I don’t give a shit what the goddamn song says, I bet it was only half your choice anyway.” 

“The song?” 

“Your teammates are who they are.”

“Jesus.” 

“It probably goes hard, I dunno, whatever, but I know it wasn’t you. You wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, no shit.” He doesn’t even look surprised.

You get him two Ibluprofens from the medicine cabinet in the background. He takes them silently, drains the rest of his water, and refills the glass. You lean against the counter next to him. The world comes back into focus a little. You can feel your fingernails biting into your palm again, and you force yourself to stop it. 

“This doesn’t mean I think what you did is okay,” he says after a while. 

“It was that or die, Mike.” 

“I don’t give a shit.” 

“That’s fine.” 

“I don’t need you to tell me it’s fine. And I’m done talking about it.” 

“Okay.” 

“Okay.” 

Time passes. Neither of you say anything. After a while, you text Sutton and tell her it’s okay to come home now if she wants. She says she’s on her way. You get dinner started and help Mike set up the pullout couch while you wait for the water for the rice to boil, and when Dreamy comes back, Mike awkwardly reintroduces himself to her and she does the same. 

Conversation is slow at the dinner table, but it’s there, however hesitant and meaningless. You don’t expect to sleep much tonight, if at all, but you get ready for bed early anyway. Dreamy and Mike do too. Nothing else left. Maybe things’ll be different in the morning, maybe they won’t, but it’s worth it to at least try. 

You’re trudging out into the kitchen to turn out the lights when Mike pushes himself upright on the couch, blinking wearily. “Hey,” he says. 

“Hey,” you reply, hand hovering over the lightswitch. “How’s it going?” 

He snorts. “Could be worse.” 

“Yeah. Good to be alive again?” 

“I wasn’t dead,” he reminds you.

You shrug. “You weren’t not dead.” 

“Yeah.” He pauses. “Jay, would you m—” He stops midsentence, fingers flexing on the top of the couch, but you know. You give it a moment, pretend to weigh your options, but. 

“Whatever you want, man. Just let me tell Dreamy real quick.” He grimaces, and you wave him off. “She’ll get it. Seriously. Gimme a sec.”

She gets it. You come back through the hallway, flick off the kitchen lights, and muddle your way blindly to the couch, then climb onto the creaky little mattress next to Mike. You can’t remember the last time you slept next to him. During high school, maybe, when he’d sleep over at your house? Later on, passing out in a drunken tangle of limbs in the apartment you used to share? Drifting off watching a movie on the sofa? 

You don’t know, but he pushes his head into your collarbone, same as he always did before, and you sling an arm over him. _I’ve killed people with that arm,_ you think but don’t say. If the thought occurs to him too he doesn’t show it. 

He’s out within a few minutes. You hear his breath go slow and even, and you try to match its pattern. Later, much later, you fall asleep too.

* * *

It’s not normal after that but by now you know better than to expect normal. You try to expect nothing and you even mostly succeed. 

It’s just that the thing is, you want so badly for Mike to just be _over_ it already. You want him to trust you and like you and laugh with you and crack unfunny jokes the way you both used to eight years ago, ten, fifteen, twenty. You want to come up with pretentious concept albums together and make fun of his dumbass lyrics. You want to write yourself into a different song with him. But neither of you have played guitar in years. 

* * *

“How long do you think Mike’s staying?” Dreamy asks, picking at a loose thread at the hem of her sweater. Weather’s getting colder. “This isn’t me saying he needs to leave, by the way. I’m just wondering. The couch can’t be comfortable.” 

You shrug. He’s back in Seattle for the next few days, practicing with the Garages and getting to know them again, but he’d left some of his clothes neatly folded by the couch, and before he left he asked Dreamy quietly if she’d be alright with him maybe staying a little longer, so. 

“I dunno. I figure a while if we don’t directly tell him to get out. I mean, he’ll find a place in Seattle to sleep during the games there, but other than that he’ll probably come back here when he can. A sort of home base.” Mike’s like that. Latches onto people, slots himself carefully into their lives like maybe if he’s quiet enough about it then they won’t shove him back out. He practically lived at your house in high school, crashed in your dorm more nights than not in college. 

You didn’t ask about it, just let him in every time he showed up at your door. By the time you both moved off-campus at the end of sophomore year it wasn’t even a question that you’d be sharing an apartment. You did that for another six years, give or take. Then you died. 

You realize you haven’t said anything for too long, but Sutton hasn’t done anything to break the silence. She’s just looking at you, still idly rubbing the hem of her sweater between her thumb and forefinger, considering.

“Dreams, it’s your apartment,” you tell her after the pause drags out a few seconds longer. “If you want him to leave, he’ll go. I’ll even tell him myself. I don’t want to…” You wave your hand at the general space of the apartment. “Like, this is a one-bedroom place. It was small even before I moved in. Definitely wasn’t meant for three people.” 

“The counter has three stools at it,” she points out, and you look at her. “Always has.” She meets your gaze evenly. 

“I mean. Yeah,” you admit. “But—” 

“Of course he’s staying,” Dreamy says, turning to start on the dishes from breakfast; end of conversation. “If he needs somewhere to go, we have room for him. I’ll wash, you dry?” 

“Okay,” you say, and another weight you hadn’t even noticed pressing down on your spine lifts off without warning. You breathe out something like a laugh and grab a dishtowel. “Sure.” 

* * *

The three of you fall into something like a routine. If Mike’s in town, he wakes up an hour before you and Dreamy so he can have some time to himself and start some food. You drag yourself out of bed once you smell coffee and Sutton follows soon after, and you all eat breakfast together at the counter, Sutton sitting on the rightmost stool, you in the middle, and Mike on the left. 

On the days you don’t have practice in Charleston, you work out in the Crabitat clubhouse’s training room; on the days that you do, you head out to Charleston around noon (there is, thank God, a Charleston a fifty-minute drive from Baltimore, which serves your purpose fine). Dreamy practices with the Crabs three days a week. Mike’s in and out, only attends the few Garages practices he feels like going to. 

Most days, you’re all home again by five. And you talk—you and Mike are getting better at that, the talking; before blaseball neither of you ever shut up but shit’s changed in the last decade, so Dreamy’s gotten real good at carrying conversations but then again you don’t want her life to be one long chain of experiences in which she picks up your fuckin’ slack—or you don’t talk, and either way’s mostly fine. Then Mike bakes something or goes off to read a book or scrolls through social media, and you try to remember what a hobby is and search for one that doesn’t make you bored or frustrated as fuck. Dreamy sketches. 

She picked that up somewhere over the course of the last few years and she’s not, like, an artistic prodigy or anything, but you’re enamored with the art she makes anyway. It’s mostly just graphite sketches, rudimentary snapshots of the world as she sees it. The rough features of someone half-remembered from the grocery store or the view out your bedroom window. A tree. A blaseball stadium. Never anything totally finished, never colored in, but your eyes catch on the lines and stay caught. There’s something about the sketches or maybe it’s just that there’s something about her, but either way. 

Because you are what you are, some small selfish part of you envies her. She’s just so easily _alive._ Doesn’t think about her pulse or what she has to do to earn its continued presence. Doesn’t have to scrape a self out of any wreckage. Every part of her is salvageable. She has hobbies and friends and a team standing behind her and an infinite future stretching ahead. 

Because you are what you are, some part of you envies her. Because you are what you are, the rest just loves her so much it hurts. 

* * *

Why did you do it? Because you wanted to live. 

Why did she stand by you? Because she wanted you to live too. 

* * *

She also owns a guitar—has since season one, maybe before—which, you think, might be what gets Mike to pick up his own again, Sutton quietly plucking out “Landslide” while sitting crosslegged on the living room floor, staring intently at her own fingers on the fretboard as they shifted and grimacing whenever a chord comes out half-muted. Eventually Mike joins her, and they pass the acoustic off to each other, back and forth, and he teaches his hands how to move in the right way again after three years of nothing. Slow going but he’s getting there. You know how it works. Sometimes you join in too. Mike doesn’t look at you much, but he’ll hand you the guitar after he’s done and laugh if you play something bad. 

Look, life goes on. It did when you came back too. Team practices get more frequent. The next season gets closer. You adjust and so does Dreamy and so does Mike. 

“So, ascension,” Dreamy says one day while Mike’s out buying groceries, and you freeze and put down the guitar. 

“Ascension,” you echo, heart sinking. “Dreams—”

“It’s not a sure thing,” she interrupts. “I mean, the Pies got blocked after two wins and so did the Tigers. We aren’t guaranteed a third championship. Historically, those don’t happen.” 

“Thieves barely won the last one off you guys,” you point out. “It was close. Like, seriously, bottom of the fuckin’ ninth, three-point homer.” Stu’s a hell of a batter sometimes. You remember that second of elation and you hadn’t thought you even gave a shit about whether your team won anymore, but Stu’d gone up to bat and knocked the pitch out of the damn park and rounded the bases, laughing deliriously, everybody in the stadium on their feet cheering with her, and it was impossible not to leap up with them. And you’d known Sutton wouldn’t ascend, in that moment. You got to keep her, even if only for one more year.

“Don’t remind me,” she mutters. Sore spot for all Crabs, you figure. “But even if we do win a third time—” 

“You would get destroyed by god,” you say testily, “because I didn’t manage to fucking _kill_ it when I had my chance. And then you’d ascend if you survived that. This isn’t—”

“This isn’t a hypothetical is what it is, so we have to talk about it, Jay,” she snaps. “We put it off til the last minute last season and look where it got us. There’s a blessing this season, People’s Champions—”

“It steals three players from the winning team,” you say, then snort. “Sure. Three outta fourteen, so a little over twenty percent chance of it hitting you. Not gonna lie, babe, I’m not a huge fan of those odds. And that’s assuming it actually goes off before you guys ascend which, again, nobody knows what that even means except you’re probably gone for good.” How many ways can you possibly lose someone? 

She leans against the kitchen counter and closes her eyes, rubs at her temples. “Okay, so it’s not great. Listen, this is—it’s blaseball, you know? We’ve always known me being gone someday was a possibility. I’ve had my will drawn up since season two and I edited it once you came back so it’s up to date. It’s fine. I’m ready.” 

“No you’re not.”

“Of course I’m not,” she mutters. “But.” 

But life goes on. 

“Look, I’ll make _sure_ you don’t Ascend,” you try after the silence drags on too long, shooting for a grin and maybe half-succeeding. “With me pitching? You’ll all have to fuckin’ _work_ for it.” 

She smiles wearily, finally opening her eyes and meeting yours. “Good.” 

* * *

As with most conversations like this: you think of the _I’m sorry_ too late. The _I just want you to be happy_ and the _I just want you to stay_ and the _I love you_ and the _If there’s any way I can help—_ and the _If you need anything—_ and the offer of a hug and the kiss pressed to her hairline, they’re all afterthoughts that should’ve just been regular thoughts, because somewhere along the line you forgot how to be a fucking _human being_ about this kind of thing. 

You don’t know when you got bad at loving her, but you also don’t know how to fix it. Life goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on. Life goes on, and you want to live it with her, so you do what you can. And if it’s not enough you’ll—

You’ll get better at it. You won’t take any other option, so you’ll get better at it. 

Most nights, you hold her as she sleeps. Or doesn’t sleep. Neither of you get much of that. But either way you hold her. Tonight, though, she’s sleeping, and she’s tucked against your chest and you feel her fingers curl into the worn fabric of your t-shirt, you feel her pressing herself in closer to you despite everything, and you look down at her sleeping face and you think _I love you,_ and you think _I am not going to lose you,_ and it’s the most you’ve meant anything in years. 

* * *

Season ten is, somehow, about as close to idyllic as you’ve gotten in this stupid game since season one. It’s still a goddamn living nightmare, but whatever, fuck, you haven’t hit anybody with a pitch all season and you don’t have a debt to pay and you're living with your girlfriend and you only work one out of every five days and you get to see Mike every once in a while and you aren’t getting tossed between teams and mostly people only look at you with disgust when they remember that they’re supposed to be disgusted, and if you block out what’s ahead it’s not too hard to believe that the worst is all behind you. 

Pitching under solar eclipses still makes your blood go cold. It’s still miserable to play in the blooddrain, the dark viscous downpour of it dripping off your cap and over your fingers, washing red over the white tile of the shower as you scrub yourself clean later. The crows still follow you wherever you go and still mob overhead, a murder—a _murder,_ ha, that’s fun, you wonder if the gods did that one on purpose—all feathers and blackened skies and talons and harsh throaty cries. 

It’s apocalyptic but in a way you know how to handle. The world has been ending for you for the last decade. You understand how this works by now. 

The team’s fine. It’s a nice change to be on one that’s good at the fuckin’ game. Good people, too, as long as you ignore Dix’s bloodthirst, but even then it’s not like you can condemn him, right? 

(You watch him tear into Farrell Seagull’s arm and you grimace but you don’t look away. At least he doesn’t try to act sorry about it. Comes back to the dugout later licking his lips. Defensive ability boost, according to the scoreboard. You’ll never do the same but you understand. Esme looks at him with disgust she doesn’t bother to hide, and she isn’t an angry woman but she’s one with a strong sense of justice, of fairness, and everyone knows this isn’t it. You make eye contact with Dix as he wipes his mouth on his sleeve and you know he isn’t going to stop.) 

Stu invites you over for a movie night a week or so into the season and you’re so fucking baffled by the offer all you can say is yes. You watch _Alien_ on her normal couch in her normal apartment on her normal street in downtown Charleston, and you have no idea if you’re doing it right (“it” being: sitting on a couch with another person watching a movie. _God_ ). She’s normal. The conversation is normal. 

Stu doesn’t get what you’ve dealt with which is alright because she doesn’t pretend to (“Huh. That sucks.” “......Uh. Yeah, it did”). It’s fine. It’s an okay night. The feeling is so novel you don’t know what to do with yourself. 

Mostly, though, you hang out in Baltimore. Take flights across the country to wherever you're pitching when you have to. You have more off days than you do workdays. Sometimes you run into Crabs pitchers in the city on their own respective days off and sometimes you don’t. You rarely talk with them long but at this point you at least know their names, the cafes they frequent, the days they play. A partial familiarity, one borne only from proximity, but a familiarity nonetheless. 

You show Mike around the city when he’s in town. You aren’t a Baltimorean, can’t claim to know the area nearly as well as Sutton does, but you can at least show him the Chessie dragon paddleboats at Pier 1 ‘cause you know he loves dorky shit like that. You pretend you’re a local, try to settle into yourself here. 

Dreamy comes back to Baltimore every few nights, sometimes more and sometimes less. You try to be there when she is. You keep the apartment clean, cook her dinner whenever she’s around. It’s all real fuckin’ housewifey of you, but you can’t really find it within yourself to mind when she walks in through the door and smiles, tired but bright and real enough to gut you, just a little. 

* * *

Except after game twenty-seven, she comes home stumbling and you know immediately that something is wrong, very wrong—she’s drenched in blood, and you knew she was playing in the blooddrain today because you always check the weather first thing after you get up every morning, but usually she’d shower off the blood before leaving the Crabitat and she’s got her arm clutched to her chest and she’s shaking, and none of that’s— 

“Siphon got me,” she rasps out in answer to the question you didn’t get a chance to ask. And you want to demand _who,_ you want a name and a face and somebody to tear apart for this, but she’s staggering so instead you cross the living room in three strides and steady her, palms on her blood-sticky shoulders. 

“Are you okay?” you ask because _fuck,_ what else can you say, and she shudders out a thin, high-pitched laugh. 

“Yeah, I’m fucking _great,_ Jay, just _bleeding through my bandages—”_ She extends her forearm away from her chest finally and she is, yeah, on top of the blood saturating her hair and dripping over the lenses of her goggles and trailing in rivulets down her neck and staining her teeth. Kennedy probably bandaged it up on the field right after it happened. Whatever he did wasn’t enough, but. It’s more than you managed. At least he was there.

You lead her to the bathroom and unwrap the bandages and look at the wound. It’s not as messy as what Dix usually does with his hook, but it’s not as clean as it could be. Skin torn ragged. Gouges in flesh. 

You breathe out hard. “Sure you don’t wanna go to the hospital for this?” 

She shrugs, mouth drawn into a flat line. “It’ll be healed by tomorrow, won’t it? ‘Play must continue.’ It doesn’t matter.” 

“Sutton,” you say quietly, and she doesn’t meet your eyes, just stares down at her mangled forearm. 

“Jay,” she echoes, just as soft. “Can you please just—” 

“If that’s what you want.” There’s a trail of blood leading from the front door to here. The blood from the downpour is starting to dry on her skin. The blood from the wound keeps oozing out. 

She doesn’t say anything. Just nods. So you start to treat the wound as best you can. 

You have to do some Googling (every website says to _take her to the ER immediately, stop reading this article and go, especially if you think you maybe see the glint of bone, what is wrong with you)_ but she doesn’t seem to mind the wait too much, just sits on the toilet lid with her eyes closed. Whatever fight had been in her’s drained out now. Barely reacts when you ease the goggles off her face. Her breaths are coming shallow but even. You clean the wound and she hisses in sharp breaths through her teeth at every touch but still doesn’t open her eyes. Rebandage. Help her shower. Get her clean clothes.

Once the blood-drenched uniform is in the wash and she's out of the shower, you resituate her so she's on the couch and start dinner. It was a day game so you know she hasn’t eaten yet and it’s something to do, something constructive and useful, because otherwise the fury burning hot in your chest is going to escape and that won’t do anybody any good, least of all Sutton. 

So you start making soup. Chicken noodle because that seems like what you’re supposed to do for this type of thing. You pull up a recipe on your phone. Get out chicken broth, vegetable broth. Chop up a carrot. 

“We won the game, at least,” she mumbles from the couch, so quiet and rough you almost think you imagined it. “9-6.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah,” she says, then doesn’t say anything else for a while. You eventually run out of things to hack up so you dump all the ingredients into the pot and watch the broth rise to a boil and leave it simmering. Stare at your hands for a few seconds. Realize that you should have gone to check on her ages ago. 

“Hey, Dreams?” you call, head jerking up. There isn’t a response, and you breathe in fast but don’t panic, not yet, because nothing’s actually _happened_ and if you panic now you won’t be useful if anything _does,_ and she’s probably just asleep anyway—shit, are you supposed to treat blood loss like a concussion? Should you have made sure she stayed awake? Jesus, you should’ve just taken her to the hospital—

But when you make it over to the couch she isn’t asleep. She’s curled half-upright, and her eyes are wide open, locked on the opposite wall, and her breaths are coming short and sharp, and she’s gripping at the fabric of her sweatpants, knuckles pale. On instinct, you kneel down next to her and reach out to touch her hand, and your fingers pass right through.

“Don’t—” she grits out too late, and her eyes squeeze shut as you pull your hand away fast. “Jay—” Her voice is tight. “Give me a minute, give me a—I’ll—it’ll be okay. Don’t w—don’t worry about me.” 

You focus on keeping your own breathing slow, for your own sake and for hers. “Okay. Look, just—I'm here, okay? I won't leave unless you want me to. Try to, um—” Your mind is absolutely blank. You used to know how to fix stuff like this, for Mike back when you were younger and for Sutton in season one, but that was a decade ago. Now you're just— “Would it help to breathe with me?” 

The words feel fucking _clinical_ coming out of your mouth, all stilted and angled wrong behind your teeth, but she nods shakily so you do it. Breathe in slow, hold, breathe out slow. Again and again and again. You want to hold her hand or something, act as an anchor, but crouched here by her side, you're close enough to see that she's still only sort of here. Still tangible but becoming less so by the second. If you tried to keep her here with you by your touch it wouldn't work. So instead you sit there beside her, your nails digging into your palms. You just sit. 

It's then that you notice the spurs of chitin breaking through the skin of her knuckles. More blood oozing from where the flesh has split. Right now, it's the most solid thing about her. 

Everything about this feels like a bad dream, nightmare upon nightmare, a senseless spinout over black ice, and you're helpless in the face of it. There's no internal logic. All you can do is breathe and hope she keeps breathing with you as crabshell creeps out of her marrow and over her fading skin. You watch the edges of her blur, your heart in your throat, and never in your life have you believed in a real God but you pray anyway. 

Maybe it pays off. Her breathing slows and evens out over the course of a few long minutes. She stops flickering towards nonexistence. The shell stops growing over her body, starts to recede back into bone, leaving only raw-scraped skin that will be healed by dawn. Dreamy is left trembling on the couch, eyes shut, knees hugged to her chest. You're left with her. 

Hesitant: “Is it okay if I—” 

She doesn't even let you finish. “Please.” 

You ease into the couch beside her, careful to avoid the wounds, and you wrap your arms around her. She sinks into your touch, exhausted, and you rub her shoulder and she winces and you stop and she sighs out a shaky breath, leaning closer anyway. 

Later, you'll let go to fill up a glass of water for her from the kitchen sink. Later, you’ll eat the soup together in silence. Later, you'll get ready for bed with her and crawl under the covers and pull her close and pretend neither of you will have to step back out on a field tomorrow.

Later, you'll let go. For now, though, you hold on. 

* * *

Maybe it shouldn't have surprised you. She plays the game half-carcinized and only semireal. 

They say it’s a blessing from the Crabs’ patron deity. It's the team gimmick, the crabshell. Nagomi Mcdaniel’s jaw is all mandible at this point, one of her arms a massive pincer. Kennedy Loser has eyestalks protruding from his forehead and an armored spine. Dreamy’s much the same. You've seen game footage; you've played the Crabs in person. None of them find it worth mentioning at this point. Stacked up next to necromancy, the slow physical transformation into a crablike monstrosity is more or less unremarkable. 

But Sutton phasing in and out of existence is—you don't know how much even _she’s_ aware of it. The intangibility sets you on edge. It, too, is a gimmick. Another layer to the perpetual performance of this game. Another metaphor made flesh. It's just that it's not one you think she's in control of. 

Neither have any business here, off the field and in your home. Neither have any business with Sutton Dreamy the person as opposed to the player. 

You wonder what happens if she loses control of herself for good. If one of these days she breaks hard enough that the armor comes up around her until there's no flesh left, enough that her body fades entirely beneath, enough that she becomes pure shell. 

Play would continue, probably. It has to. She just wouldn't be the one playing. 

You decide to stop wondering. 

* * *

(It’s the seventh season and you’ve gone too long without collecting, too long without someone in a stadium far away going up in smoke as some of the smoke surrounding you lifts away. The absence of fire burns somewhere under your skin, vicious and hot, and you can’t focus; you can’t do anything at all; every time you pitch a game you’ve been hitting more people with increasing desperation but it’s not doing shit, you haven’t gone this long without a death since before Ruby Tuesday—

—so you’re pacing around the apartment, strung out and exhausted, and your nerves are aflame but nothing else is, and your brain feels like it’s fucking _eating_ itself—

“Okay,” you say. “Look—” and you’re only half-looking at Dreamy out of the corner of your eye, but something in your voice must tip her off because she steps out from behind the kitchen counter into the living room to face you, exhaling sharply. You stop pacing. 

“We aren’t doing this,” she says, warning. “I’m not going to—” but you’re stuck on it now, you need something to tear at with, nails and teeth, or you think you’ll—

“I’m just saying you don’t have to keep me here,” you tell her, and she gazes at you flatly and says nothing. Your fingers curl and uncurl, the bones in your knuckles popping. “I’m not gonna—I won’t be _mad_ at you. I don’t want you to stay with me out of some sense of obligation or sunk cost fallacy or a goddamn martyr complex or whatever the fuck. I just want you to kn—” 

“I _already_ know!” she snaps. “Jesus, Jay, I know I can _leave_ you.” You breathe out hard, don’t meet her eyes. “Look at me.” You do. “Do you want me to do that?” 

“Of course not,” you say, no hesitation. Of course.

She nods, bottom lip caught between her teeth. “Okay. Good. So we’re going to fix this” 

“I just—” Again the desperation. You feel starved and you don’t even know what for. “Dreams, I could _kill_ you.” 

She stares at you for a few seconds, silent. Then laughs, a harsh and incredulous burst of noise, too loud for the tiny living room. 

“Yeah, I guess you could.” There’s still this hysterical edge of amusement in her voice. “But Jay—” She steps closer and reaches into her pocket, pulls out her jackknife, and flicks it open with her thumb, every movement deliberate. “I could kill you too.” Sutton rests her index finger on the tip of the knife and holds your gaze, unblinking. Blood beads at the point, and she doesn’t so much as flinch. 

Your breath stutters, and it’s a moment before you can speak again. “But you won’t.” Her eyes stay on yours, dark and intense, and she nods. 

“Exactly. And you won’t kill me either, and I know that. Don’t be stupid.” She takes two more steps closer, and she doesn’t raise the knife to your throat but she looks like she’s thinking about it. “We want to fix this, so we will.”

“It’s not that simple,” you tell her, and a dark red droplet trails its way down the blade. You watch it drip onto the hardwood in your peripheral vision, but you don’t look away from her.

“It really, really is,” she says.) 

* * *

If Sutton wanted, you would let her pin you down and cut you open and pull out your teeth one by one, rip her hands ragged on your edges. You would let her tear you apart in any way she liked. If anyone’s blood is in her mouth it should be yours. 

You don’t say it aloud. You never will. But you think about it. 

* * *

The next morning, behind a locked bathroom door, Dreamy shaves her head. She’d been growing her hair out for years, since the start of the first season. She doesn’t ask you to help.

“Got tired of cleaning the blood out each game,” she mumbles later by way of explanation when you hand her her morning coffee. “It wasn’t good for my hair anyway, washing it that much. Would’ve just made it worse in the long run.” You hadn’t asked for a reason, but you still nod. “I’ll get it recut into a fade when I have the time.” 

“It looks good,” you offer, and it’s true—pretty much anything would look good on Dreamy, as far as you’re concerned; she’s just kind of like that, though you hold that it’s especially true with short hair—but she just rubs her hand over the back of her head and makes a face. 

“At least it won’t be like this forever.”

* * *

Inexplicably, on one of the nights that both you and Mike aren’t pitching, Sutton invites the entire Baltimore Crabs roster over to the apartment at once. She gives you about five hours’ notice. 

There is exactly one honorable way to feed that many people with that little time and it’s spaghetti, so you go to Slafeway with Mike and pick up a metric ton of dry noodles and spend several dog years concocting a red sauce that hopefully won’t get you laughed out of Baltimore by your girlfriend’s found family. 

(If you’re going to be honest: you are absurdly nervous about this. You feel like you’re getting dragged back to Dreamy’s hometown to meet her mom and dad after years of dating her, except instead of her hometown, it’s your shared apartment, and instead of two regular-intimidating parents, it’s twelve part-crab pro athletes who hate you and perpetually exist at varying levels of eldritch body horror on a case-by-case scenario. The bright side, though, is that you couldn’t have gotten off on more of a wrong foot with them if you tried, given the secret relationship and then all the murders, so you figure it can only get better from here.)

You wait awkwardly by the door for a while, then realize you’re being weird about it and flop down on the couch, then get antsy sitting still for longer than three seconds and get up and start cleaning again. Mike, for his part, watches from the kitchen with amusement he doesn’t bother to hide. 

“What, scared they aren’t gonna like you?” 

“Mike, dude, I _know_ they don’t like me. Like, for real, I've already run into half of them individually by mistake at, like, Target, but I’m gonna get twelve different versions of the shovel talk tonight and—”

He wrinkles his nose. “I thought the shovel talk was a made-up trope.” 

“Yeah, ‘cause I always made your boyfriends promise not to tell when I did it for you.” 

“You _threatened_ my _boyfriends?”_

“You’re _welcome._ It’s not my fault you always dated shitty and inherently threatenable men,” you mutter. “And it isn’t like it ever _worked,_ but still. I figure if they’re gonna cheat on you the least I can do is put the fear of God into them about it first.” 

Mike snorts, reaching over to stir the spaghetti sauce. “In that case, turnabout’s fair play. I hope Brock Forbes scares the shit out of you tonight.” 

“My bets are on Tot Fox being the most terrifying, personally,” you say.

“Aren’t they an actual, literal fox?” 

“Yeah. They could fuckin’ _bite_ me.” 

“Technically, so could any of them, provided they have teeth,” he points out, and you put your face in your hands. 

“They sure could, huh.” 

“I’m just saying it would be really funny if you got chomped by, like, Adalberto Tosser.” 

“For you, maybe.” 

“And that’s all that matters!” 

When the Crabs burst in through the front door, they do so without ceremony or warning, talking and laughing and incandescent off a 10-2 victory against the Firefighters. They don’t pay any attention to you, which is always a thrilling plot twist, except Sutton, who crosses the room immediately to kiss you on the cheek, reaching out to squeeze your hand. 

“I promise I’m not doing this just to make you suffer,” she tells you, grinning, and you roll your eyes. 

“I promise I didn’t think you were in the first place.” 

She shrugs, leaning into you briefly. “It would be a reasonable assumption to make. My team can be kind of—”

“A lot, sure,” you say, eyeing Brock and Adalberto, who are already shoving each other around in the kitchen, playfully bickering about God knows what. “But seeing as I probably should’ve gone through this gauntlet about a decade ago anyway—”

“Yeah, you’ll live,” she smiles, squeezing your hand one more time before letting go. 

Dinner is, in general, fine. You don’t really know what you expected there; you’re all adults. The youngest they let you join blaseball is eighteen anyway and most of these people have been here long enough to be well into their thirties. Everyone’s just normal, for the given definition of normal. They’re all varying degrees of carcinized, shell showing through under jerseys or mandibles picking at their food or pincers holding the forks, but that’s blaseball-normal, so whatever. 

Kennedy and his anglerfish woman ghost wife end up sharing an armchair, and the pitcher dudes all sit at the counter, and half the lineup crams themselves onto the couch, and you end up sitting crosslegged on the ground next to Parra and Dreamy, who are talking animatedly to each other.

Everyone is, actually. Talking. Even Mike seems to be having a good time with Bertie, Brock, and Montgomery at the counter. In theory, you’re hosting, but nobody seems concerned with that—most of the lineup’s either talking about the three-run homer Nagomi hit earlier that day, and Sutton and Acevedo’s triples, and the great inning-ending catch Pedro made, or they’re engaged in side conversations you don’t want to eavesdrop on. 

It’s strange to see this kind of uncomplicated affection for the game and stranger still to be in such a big group, all banter and laughter and easy camaraderie. It kinda reminds you of how you used to be with the Garages, back in the earlier days. Those rare in-between moments where you were on good terms with everyone, even Teddy and Allie, and you were just a band and a team and a group of friends. But it hasn’t been like that for years. It never will be again. 

Abruptly, you stand and walk down the hall to the bedroom, and nobody so much as looks up to watch you go. You curl your lip at the heavy, exhausted feeling in your chest, disgusted. Fuckin’ stupid to feel like this. When you chose to pitch that first ball at Dickerson Morse’s hip you knew what it would mean for you. 

You knew what you were the second you clawed your way out of the earth. You just had to become it. And you did, without hesitation, and here you are now. 

You open the door to the bedroom, walk to the window, remove the screen, unlock it, pull it open, and squeeze yourself through the gap out onto the fire escape. It’s muggy, late June, and the city air doesn’t sit right in your lungs, but it’s better than being inside. 

Your fingers curl around the railing and you take a breath. You’ll go back inside soon. But for the moment, the sounds of the city are a comfort. Baltimore’ll never be somewhere you can call yours, but it’s a good place to come back to. You’ll take that. 

Something rustles behind you and you whip around, right hand in a claw at your side like—like you’re holding a ball, ready to pitch. Jesus. You force yourself to relax your fingers, squint into the dark. For a moment you hold on to the hope that maybe it’s Dreamy, but then you see a face in the shadows, and it’s far too pale to be her, the body too short and stocky, and your heart drops. 

“Kennedy,” you greet flatly. You can see him fully in the light from the street now. His expression is carefully neutral. You want to throw something at him. 

“Hi, Jaylen,” he says, pushing the window open wider and stepping outside. 

“What the fuck were you doing in my bedroom?”

He puts his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket and meets your gaze evenly. “I asked where I could go to get some fresh air, and she said the fire escape was through the bedroom window.” 

“Cut the shit, Kennedy,” you say. 

“It’s what she said,” he insists. 

You roll your eyes and turn back to the alleyway, pressing your palms firm against the railing. “Yeah, I’m not fuckin’ arguing with _that._ What are you actually out here for?” 

He shrugs easily. “Fresh air, like I said. And to talk to you.” 

“Then say that first next time.” 

“Okay. I’m here to talk to you.” He leans against the railing by a couple feet to your right, looking out over the streets instead of at you, which is some small relief. 

You sigh, dig your fingernail into your cuticle. “If this is about Sutton—” 

“You know it is,” he says. To his credit, he keeps his voice light. Then again, from what Dreamy’s told you, Kennedy has too much experience with this kind of stuff; he’s the team captain and therefore also, apparently, the team pseudotherapist. Good at defusing the shitty psychological wiring of blaseball players. The calm, comforting butch dad thing is just part of the persona. 

You don’t want to be comforted by it, so you won’t be. “Fine. Say your piece.” 

“This is a conversation, not a lecture,” he tells you gently. “I’m talking _to_ you, not _at_ you.” You shrug mutinously, feeling for all the world like a surly goddamn teenager instead of an adult woman, but he nods, evidently satisfied. Takes a deep breath as if steeling himself. “Jaylen, I’m not saying there’s something wrong with your relationship with Sutton—” 

“Good,” you interrupt, immediately bristling. “You shouldn’t. It’s none of your business.” 

“Let me finish,” he says. “There isn’t anything wrong with you dating her. You’re both adults; I have no say in what either of you do.” 

You snort. “You’re three years late to this conversation, Kennedy.” 

“I would have said this three years ago, Jaylen, but something tells me you wouldn’t have listened back then, and I don’t like wasting my effort. So I talked to Sutton instead. Now I’m talking to you because I think you’re ready to hear it. Don’t change the subject.” _A conversation, not a lecture. Sure, Ken._

You bite the inside of your cheek. “Fine.” 

Another deep breath, and he shifts beside you, eyes still fixed on the horizon. “She’s my teammate, and more importantly she’s my friend, and I worry.”

“God. _Fuck_ you. I don’t pose any threat to her.” Your hand is clenched uselessly tight around the railing. “I swear I—”

He shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean. I’m just saying you probably—look, you’re the protagonist of this game, at least for right now. It’s about you. You know that as well as I do; there’s no point in denying it.” You instinctively open your mouth to argue, but he holds up a hand and keeps talking and fuck, it’s not like he’s _wrong._ “But other people suffer too, Jaylen. She’s not coping as well as she thinks she is with all this.” 

“With all _what?”_ you snap. It comes out even harsher than intended, past the point of bothering to regulate your tone. 

Kennedy laughs shortly. “God, what d’you _think?_ She got blooddrained last week, she faces down death or serious injury every day, her future isn’t her own, she’s carcinizing, she flickers in and out of reality, there’s a solid chance of her ascending at the end of the season, the woman she’s in love with died nine years ago and came back a murderer, and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my _head!”_

“Kennedy—”

“I worry about her, that’s all,” he says, and his eyes are on you again, unyielding. “I always have. I was the one who took care of her after you burned, you know.” 

“I hadn’t forgotten.” You pull your bottom lip between your teeth and bite down until you taste copper. “Thank you. For that.” 

“Of course,” he says, softer. And you’re grateful to him, you _are,_ you can’t imagine what those first few months would have been like for her without him, but he’s—

You stand there in the quiet. Neither of you want to stay out here, you’re pretty sure, but leaving now would feel like admitting defeat somehow, so instead you stare out at the city skyline until your eyes burn. 

“I don’t think you give Sutton enough credit,” you burst out after a few more minutes of agonizing semisilence, and Kennedy turns to look at you, raising a greying eyebrow. 

“What do you mean?” he asks evenly. 

“I mean she’s stronger than you think she is. The shit she’s gone through is—I don’t know how she did what she did. I don’t know how she stuck with me.” Your breath is shuddering and you hate how vulnerable you feel out of nowhere, like you’ve bared your throat to him without meaning to. “After everything she’s had to deal with—she’s stronger than you’re giving her credit for, that’s all.” 

Kennedy doesn’t say anything for a while. Just considers, brow furrowed. So you wait. 

“Jaylen,” he finally says, careful. “Just because someone _can_ bear something doesn’t mean they _should._ ” 

You falter. “I know.” He doesn’t look convinced. “I _know,”_ you repeat, shoulders tensing. “Jesus Christ, Kennedy, what kind of person do you think I am?” 

“What kind of person do _you_ think you are?” 

You laugh, and it isn’t a very nice sound. “I’m not doing that bullshit. I know what I am.”

His lips twitch into a wry smile. “It was worth a shot.” 

“If you want to psychoanalyze me, you’re gonna have to put in the work yourself.” A sigh rushes out of you, longer and rougher than you wish it was. “Look, what were you trying to do here?” 

“I don’t know,” he admits, and you snort. “Seriously. I just wanted to—check in, I guess. That you were...”

“I’m trying to take care of her,” you say curtly, and leave it at that. He’s waiting for you to say something else, you can feel it, but you’re done with this. You don’t owe him shit. You just didn’t want to upset Dreamy by telling him to fuck off the second he came out here. 

“Okay,” he says. “Good.” If he’s thinking _she deserves more than whatever you think you can give her,_ if he’s thinking _she would be better off without you,_ if he’s thinking _how could you be worth that much pain,_ if he’s thinking _she should have just left you three years ago and I have no idea why she’s stayed,_ if he’s thinking any of that—he doesn’t say it. You sort of wish he would. Give you something to dig your claws into. Something real to tear at. But he doesn’t, probably because he knows that’s what you want, and in that moment, you hate him so much you can’t think. 

You’re about to snap out something else in spite of whatever you’ve promised yourself when you hear Dreamy’s voice behind you. “Hey!” She sounds so uncomplicatedly happy it makes something twist low in your stomach and you force yourself to let go of the railing, turn, and smile at her. “What’re you two doing out here?”

“Just talking,” you say, watching her clamber out onto the fire escape. “We both wanted some fresh air.” 

She grins, reaching out to link your fingers together and leaning against your side a little. “Yeah, it’s crowded in there,” she says. She sounds like she’s nothing but genuinely delighted about it. You squeeze her hand. 

“I can host this kind of thing next time,” Kennedy offers. The hard set to his face is gone without a trace, replaced with the familiar, prominent smile lines. “Finn and I have the extra room for it.” 

“Just say you’re married with a townhouse and go,” you say, and it comes out on the sharper side of teasing, but he laughs anyway. 

“You can come too, if you like,” he says, and you raise your eyebrows. 

“You sure?” 

“Wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t,” he replies, and Dreamy beams up at you, and God, you really can’t say no. 

* * *

But you can’t stop thinking about what he said. 

“Hey,” you say, and she lifts her head off your chest, blinking drowsily. “I was thinking—” 

“Dangerous,” she deadpans. “Try not to hurt yourself.” 

“I’ll do my best,” you say dryly, then sigh. “Look, I just—I’m not, I dunno, manic-pixie-dream-girl-ing you, am I?”

Her response is immediate. “Well, I’m not manic, not a pixie, a dream probably solely in the nominative determinism sense, and only tangentially a girl. One and a half at worst isn't too bad.” 

“You know what I meant,” you mutter, and she laughs, short and knife-sharp. 

“Yeah, I knew what you meant, but it was fucking _stupid,_ so—”

“Seriously, Sutton—”

She puts a hand on your face to make you look at her and you go still at her touch. “I know you know I’m a person, Jay. Don’t be—listen, I would’ve left by now if I ever thought you didn’t.” She snorts. “Just try your very best not to use me for character development and we’re good.”  
  


You bring a hand up to cover hers, fingertips resting on her knuckles. “You’ll tell me if I’m fucking up, right?”

Dreamy grins and tilts her head. “Always.” 

“I’m just saying you can get mad at me,” you push, and the smile disappears just as quickly. 

“I know I can, and, trust me, I _do,_ and can we please stop having these conversations where you self-flagellate and try to convince yourself to treat me like glass? I’m not fucking _fragile,_ and the fact that y—”

“Of course you’re not,” you snap. “You think I trust anyone else with my bullshit the way I trust you? You think I trust anyone else the way I trust you at _all?”_ Her mouth draws into a flat line and she doesn’t meet your eyes and some mean, petty part of you is triumphant. “I just don’t want to hurt you.” 

She breathes out a wry laugh. “I think we both know we’re well past that point.”  
  


And of course she’s right, but your heart still drops. “Yeah, well. I don’t want to do it more. And I especially don’t want to do it if it’s preventable.” Especially if she’s going to be gone in less than half a year from now. Or if she burns to death during the game tomorrow. Or if you die again. There are countless clocks ticking down the time you have left together, and the only question is which one reaches zero first. 

“I’m just saying of course we’re going to hurt each other,” Dreamy says. “That’s how life goes. As long as you’re trying not to, I’m not going to get mad about it.” She chuckles under her breath. “Right now, I’m mostly just tired of arguing. I only get a few hours off per day, you know. I’d rather not spend them angry.” 

“That’s fair,” you admit, wrapping your arms around her more tightly, and she hums softly and curls closer, laying her head back down over your collarbone. Your neck aches like this, propped up weirdly on the couch armrest, but you don’t tell her to move. 

“That’s the real reason you pitchers are so damn neurotic,” she mumbles against your shirt. “You’ve got too many days off to think about it all. Just work every day and repress it like normal people.”  
  


“That can’t be healthy.” 

Dreamy laughs, turning her face up toward you. “Oh, and you’re the authority on mental health, Jay? You’re the keeper of the best coping mechanisms? The fucking—emotional regulation sage?” 

_“Some_ one had to be,” you say, grinning. 

“Well, thanks for taking the bullet.” 

“Anytime, babe.” It comes out too serious, but you don’t take it back. Instead, you bend down to press a kiss between her eyebrows where worry has worn a permanent crease, a line carved deep into her skin. She smiles and leans up to kiss you properly, hand still cradling your face, and you keep thinking you don’t care about redemption but her forgiveness means more to you than you’d like to admit. You kiss back. 

* * *

“Wait wait wait wait, Sutton, I think you’ll like this one,” Mike grins, gesturing for her to hand him the guitar. “Gimme a sec, I gotta remember the lyrics—” 

“Which one?” you ask, shoving yourself further upright where you’re propped against the side of the couch.

He waves you off, laughing. “Oh, you know this one, Jay, don’t worry!” 

Sutton laughs too and scoots closer, passing him the instrument. “Do _I_ know it?”  
  


“I don’t wanna spoil the surpriiiiise,” he complains, cheeks alcohol-flushed, and his fingers fumble to form the starting chord. “‘S not ‘Wonderwall’, I pinky promise.” 

“Fuckin’ better not be,” you say as Dreamy flops back against your shoulder.

“It’s _so_ much better,” he says, then frowns, then shapes his fingers into a C on the fretboard and beams and starts strumming. He goes from C to A minor to G to F, and you recognize the chords and, actually, hey, you’re pretty sure you recognize the strumming pattern too—

“Hang on,” you start, but Mike’s already started singing. 

_“You might have heard that Jaylen is pretty cool—”_

“Oh my _God,”_ you say, and he cackles. 

_“She was the best rock-n-roll guitarist at Ballard High School, but she’s the worst at darts when we go out for drinks. Yeah she never wins her bets and then she blames the rest of us—”_

You groan. “I can’t believe you remember the lyrics to the fucking slander song you wrote about me a _decade_ ago, Michael.” 

“The slander song you wrote about _me_ is a chart-topping hit, you shithead, let me have this.” He frowns down at his guitar again and keeps strumming into the pre-chorus. “Something something regrets, something something texting. Oh! _She’ll call you cringe for writing indie and then she’ll ask for her melodica back…”_ Dreamy snorts and starts to say something, but Mike holds up a hand for silence and launches into the chorus: _“Jaylen Hotdogfingers is a maaaassive bitch! If she didn’t have me she’d be deeeead in a ditch!”_

Dreamy bursts out laughing against your side. “Mike, oh my God—” 

_“She’s ungrateful and spiteful and never gasses up the van…”_

“See?” you half-shout, half-yelp. “Slander, literally!” 

“Musical genius,” Sutton corrects. “Also one hundred percent true, so, by definition, not slander.” 

“Definitely slander,” you insist. 

Mike snickers, at this point strumming through an instrumental section. “Not slander, no. Slander is, if I remember right: spoken, untrue, and malicious statements that damage the reputation of someone, and a) this is sung, b) this is all extremely accurate, and c) there is no _fucking_ way I could further damage your reputation given all the, y’know, _actual literal murder.”_

You wave a hand and lean back against the couch, grumbling, “Fine, proceed,” and Dreamy laughs, and Mike plays on. 

* * *

During season seven you and Dreamy agreed you weren’t ever going to get married.

In between the fights and the smokehaze and the games, you talked it out. It made sense.

Look, there’s—it wasn’t like there was any doubt in either of your minds that, whatever time you had left, you would spend it together. It wasn’t even a question that you would stay with her after you came back. God knows you were halfway moved into the Baltimore apartment by the end of season one anyway. You dragged yourself out of the ground, dirt stuck under your fingernails and ash in your throat and spots dancing in your eyes and five years of nothing in your head, and the team picked you up and carried you to the locker room and filled you in on the half decade you missed, yeah, but she was the one who took you back to her apartment. She was the one who helped you shower and made you dinner and held you that night while you didn’t sleep that first horrible night. She’s always been your shelter. She’s the one you’ll always come home to. 

So, sure, you agreed you weren’t ever going to get married. Marriage in the traditional sense feels fuckin’ futile in this game, so why bother? Plus combining finances or whatever married people do sounds like a nightmare and planning a wedding sounds like even more of a nightmare and when you want to dress up in formalwear with her and then have sex about it you just _do_ that. 

Except. 

Despite all that, the fact remains that when you burned, Sutton kept the ring. It wasn’t some grand statement. It was just your grandfather’s wedding ring, just a simple gold band you wore on a cord around your neck most days. Just something to remember him by once he was gone. And then something to remember you by once you were gone. And she carried it around with her for five years. 

Once you returned, she gave it back to you. It was one of the first things she did once you were home together, pulled it out from under her shirt and placed it carefully in your hand and closed your fingers around it. She must’ve fidgeted with it a lot when she was worried because sometimes you still catch her staring off into her space with her hand to her sternum where it would’ve rested, rubbing her fingers together like there’s still something between them. 

You consider it. Then, on your anniversary in season ten, you give it back to her. 

You couch it in a lot of disclaimers— _I know we said “no marriage” and I get that this looks a hell of a lot like a proposal but I promise it isn’t, so, like,_ don’t worry, _but you took care of this for five years and it’s yours as much as it’s mine and I love you_ —but you give it to her anyway, and she glows as she slips the necklace back on over her head, and it isn’t a proposal, and that’s fine. You’re already committed to each other in all the ways that matter at this point. Might as well skip the engagement. 

* * *

That being said, Mike still flips his absolute _shit_ when you start offhandedly referring to Sutton as your wife in casual conversation. 

* * *

These days your life feels like one endless late night, but you take the midnight flight home from Charleston to Baltimore anyway. You know Dreamy’s gonna be in Hawai’i of all places for the next three days, and she leaves in the morning, and you’ll take any time you can get. 

So you stumble through the front door at two in the morning, exhausted, right arm still aching, and you drop your bag in the living room and rummage through the dresser for some fresh clothes to sleep in and get changed in the darkness and, finally, collapse into bed beside her. Press your face into the pillowcase. 

It’s too hot to sleep under the sheets so Sutton’s starfished out on top of them and you’re balanced precarious at the edge of the mattress. For a moment you think you’ve at least gotten away with coming home without waking her up, but it’s then that she stirs beside you. Fumbles out over the sheets until her palm lands warm on your shoulder. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” she mumbles, eyes opening slow and bleary. “Didn’t think you’d be back tonight.” 

“Didn’t wanna miss you.” 

Despite the heat, she rolls closer, enough to push her face into the neckline of your shirt and then pull away, nose wrinkling. “You smell like planes.”

“Probably ‘cause I was on one for an hour and a half,” you mutter, and she huffs out a laugh. 

“You know you don’t have to keep taking the late flights.” 

“Sure I do.” 

She snorts and wriggles closer again. “Guess I can’t stop you.” Didn’t take a whole lot of convincing there, not that you’re complaining. 

You grin. “Yeah, you’re stuck with me now.” 

“Damn. That sucks.” A yawn, her hand sliding up from your shoulder to settle on the side of your neck. “Mm. Nope, no snappy comebacks left. ‘M too tired.” 

“So I win?”  
  
“I’m a Crabs batter, babe, I never admit defeat,” she murmurs, eyes slipping shut again. 

“So I win,” you confirm. 

“Not even remotely. It doesn’t count if I’m falling asleep. Now shut up.” 

“Make me.”

“Go to _sleep,”_ she groans, but you can hear the smile in her voice. 

“Fine, fine.” You sling an arm around her and at long last let your eyes fall closed, your hand finding its place nestled at the small of her back. 

Her hand is still on your neck, uncomfortably hot, but you don’t ask her to move it. Three years and she still checks your pulse just as often as you do, her fingers returning again and again to the hollow under your jaw, semiautomatic. She thinks she’s being subtle about it, but the movement is always a little too clumsy in a way Dreamy never is. She’s too deliberate for accidents like this, too tightly controlled. You’ve never brought it up with her. You don’t plan to.

* * *

Honestly, by now it's almost funny watching the media try to figure out how to play you both. The framing’s all wrong now for whatever they try to do next and you aren't giving them any new angles to sell.

For the first bit of season seven, they tried to make you some fragile mortal body overwhelmed by divine power, bursting at the seams with fire. Which didn’t really play ‘cause you’re six foot two and a hundred sixty pounds of muscle. A little more emaciated and ragged around then, sure, but still far from the cracked shell they were trying to turn you into. 

Then more people started dying and they switched up the script, wrote you into the avenging revenant villain, smoketongued and coalfingered, looming tall against the bright halo of an eclipse, some snarling demigod who came back from the underworld altered and fundamentally _wrong._ They made Dreamy into your unsuspecting consort or your brainwashed victim, the tragedy held jealously to your chest. The band sung you into a misunderstood hero, screaming at every loss. Their poor returned martyr with a pitching arm she can’t control anymore. 

Whatever it is, they make you an extreme because they have to. They mythologize you because if they didn’t mythologize you then they’d have to accept that any of them could have _been_ you. Any of them could have burned on the pitching mound that October. Any of them could have been brought back. Any of them could have murdered twelve people for the fuckin’ privilege of sticking around. You aren’t an archetype. You aren’t a hero or a villain or a martyr. You’re just a person. 

They’re trying to give you a goddamn redemption arc, probably. Now that you’re free of the debt. You don’t want to take it. You’re tired, so fucking _tired_ of playing their roles. 

But they’ve decided you’re done turning heel. So you twist around and you show them your face.

* * *

On the idolboard: the hot pink symbol of the Microphone next to the fourteenth slot. Déjà vu in the worst way. There are other symbols up there too, birdclaws and extinguished suns and the rest of the weather icons, but your eyes skip past those. Fourteen and the Microphone. That’s where they’ll try to put you again. You figure it’ll probably happen once day ninety-nine rolls over into day one hundred. The usual.

Of course there’s no way to know what it’ll do, but something heavy settles in your chest anyway. The ghosts of eyes on the back of your neck, unseen hands tugging at your shirt. You feel, suddenly, very watched. 

There’s the sense of time running out. But then again, that isn’t anything new. 

* * *

Day ninety-seven, and Dreamy gets blooddrained for the third time in the last three months. In San Francisco while playing the Lovers, this time. By Knight Triumphant. 

She calls you late that night from across the country, voice still shaky. “They’re taking me out of left field.” 

You roll over in your hotel bed in Hawai’i, rubbing at your eyes, and check the time. 1:02 a.m. here, so just past two there. “What?” 

“I got blooddrained. The manager called Ken as soon as the game was over. They were watching. It’s—” A shuddery breath rattles through your tinny iPhone speakers. “He took one and a half defensive stars and I already only had two and a half before. So they can’t keep me in left field, I’m not—” _I’m not good enough anymore._

“Jesus,” you mutter. “Dreams, I’m—” 

“Ugh, don’t,” she says. You listen to her try to recompose herself. “I’ll live. Just, you know, on the other side of the outfield or whatever.” Ten years spent as the de facto left fielder, and now this. Two days to what’ll probably be the Crabs’ last postseason. God. 

“Yeah, I know,” you say. “But still.” She doesn’t say anything to that. “Did you—did you get something? For your arm?”

“Ken made me go the ER, so yeah. It was a deep cut. No idea why they let Knight carry around a sword for this. Feels kind of unfair. He got Pedro and Ken too.” 

“Tell them I’m sorry.” 

Dreamy snorts. “You know they don’t want to hear that.”

You smooth your hand out over the empty sheets on her side of the bed. “It was something to say.” 

“Yeah.” She’s silent for a moment. You wait. “Jay?” 

“I’m still here.”  
  


“I miss being numb to this.” She draws in a slow breath, and you close your eyes and listen. The darknesses behind your eyelids and between her words are abyssal. “It didn’t used to get to me. I acclimated so quickly, after it all changed. I had to. But suddenly I just…” The words fade out, and she never finishes the sentence. Faintly, you can hear cars rushing through the street outside her hotel room. Or maybe they’re outside yours. You guess it doesn’t make much of a difference. 

“It’s okay if stuff gets to you,” you tell her carefully. “You don’t have to be strong all the time.” 

But she just laughs, thready and strained and balancing on the edge of hysterical. 

“Of course I do. If I don’t, I’ll—” She goes quiet again and you can imagine her like this, lying on her own hotel bed in California, bandaged arm held to her chest, eyes shut in mirror of yours, biting the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood. If you were there you would link your fingers with hers, pull her closer, maybe press a kiss between her eyebrows. If you were there you would do everything right. 

“I’m here,” you say. There’s nothing left besides that. 

“You can hang up,” she says, soft and scratchy. “I don’t have anything else to say and I know you’re pitching tomorrow. It’s late there.”

“It’s later where you are,” you point out. “I’ll stay on the line however long you want me to.” 

“Then stay,” she says, still quiet enough to go unheard if you weren’t listening as close as you are, quiet enough for plausible deniability. 

“Okay. I will.” You don’t think about your name or where it stands on the idolboard. You stay. 

* * *

On day ninety-eight, you win your game against the Fridays and fly home to Baltimore that evening. 

* * *

On day ninety-nine, you wake up early despite the jetlag. Dreamy’s still in San Francisco but Mike’s puttering around the kitchen in flannel pants and a faded Queen t-shirt, so you drink your morning coffee with him. Not much conversation to be had. You both know how these things go. 

“Think you’re gonna come home tonight?” he asks as you wash your mug out in the sink.  
  


“Maybe. Maybe not. I figure I’ll wait it out in the Thieves’ locker room. They’re all still in Hawai’i. No audience. Whatever happens to me, I don’t want any photos of it in the paper. But yeah, that’s where my stuff will be, if.” 

“Makes sense.” 

You turn off the faucet and leave the mug upside down on the rack to dry, wipe your hands off on a dishtowel. He watches, and you have no idea what he’s thinking, and it hurts. 

“Mike,” you start, and stop. If there were anything you could tell him to get back what the two of you have lost, you would have figured it out by now. 

“I’ll make sure Sutton’s alright,” he murmurs when you don’t say anything else. “If it does happen.” He stares into the dregs of his coffee. “She’s got a lot of people who care about her already, with Ken and Nagomi and everyone, but. I dunno.” 

“Thanks,” you say, at a loss. “That’s, uh. Thanks.” 

“Think you’re gonna say goodbye to her?”

“That feels kinda fucked up.” 

He exhales. “It doesn’t have to be a whole thing, Jaylen, but you have a _chance_ to this time—”

“Fuck you, man,” you snap. “Don’t tell me how to—”

“I’m not arguing with you about this—”

“What, so it’s fine for everyone _else_ to start shit with me but if I try to respond suddenly _I’m_ the one being unreasonable?” 

“I said I’m not arguing with you about this,” Mike grits out, setting the mug down on the counter. “Don’t push me on it.” 

“Fine.” You turn and stalk out of the kitchen, put on real clothes, get ready to leave. When you walk to the front door, he’s still leaned against the counter, mug resting beside him. He’s gazing out the kitchen window. 

“See you ‘round?” you try, and he snorts. 

“Yeah. See ya, Jaylen.” 

You leave. 

You spend the rest of the day killing time. There’s a part of you that considers logging onto Twitter for the first time in years just to see what happens—you got cancelled back in season one for being a little bitchy to a fan, then presumably got super-extremely-cancelled in season seven for the murders, not that you checked—but if you really are on death row, you don’t really want to spend your final day swinging bats at hornets’ nests. Another part of you considers calling up everyone you used to know, saying something like a goodbye, but then if you don’t die tonight of fan interference you’d just die of mortification instead, and you’d prefer the former. 

So instead you rent a car and drive down to Charleston, actual-South-Carolina-Charleston as opposed to bootleg-Maryland-Charleston. Just for something to do. You turn on the radio, get a live broadcast of the Crabs game. Dreamy hits a single in the top of the fifth, which makes you grin, but it’s otherwise a slow game. Crabs lose, 3-0, and Kennedy gets blooddrained again, and you decide you hate Knight Triumphant even more than you did, which was already a lot. 

Anxiety churns in your stomach, and you fight the urge to roll your eyes at it. Stupid. Whatever happens is just gonna happen. You can’t do anything about it. No point in being nervous. 

You reach Choux Stadium in the late afternoon. It’s as blessedly empty as you expected. You get a bucket of blaseballs from the equipment room, square up on the pitching mound, and hurl ball after ball into the batter’s box. In your mind’s eye, you can see each pitch thudding into the catcher’s mitt, each strikeout, each hitter staring you down from home plate. 

The movement is mechanical now regardless of whether the rest of the gears are there. It’s been a decade. You don’t deteriorate, don’t degrade. Your stats haven’t changed since the beginning. You’re frozen in motion, a perfect recording of a living legend, the same looping film until the sun goes out or you do. The context changes but you never have. You wonder if this is how it feels to be a god. 

Probably not. Gods don’t watch the sun and wait to die. 

Your shoulder starts to ache after not too long, and that probably doesn’t happen to gods either. But the sun goes down and you keep throwing, the pitches going wilder and wilder, arm shooting through with pain at each toss of the ball until you’re breathing hard, gasping every time a pitch leaves your hand. Moonlight spreads out silver over the field. Fire down your arm. Feels better than the real thing. You’d know. You gather up the balls, put them back in the bucket, and start again. 

You stop only because you have to, because time is running out. Drag the equipment and your aching body back down into the clubhouse. Sit down on the carpet in the middle of all the sofas. Symmetry demands that you burn on the pitching mound again, but _fuck_ that, you won’t give them the satisfaction. 

There’s a shotclock hanging on the wall, counting down the seconds to the end of day ninety-nine. You’ve got seven minutes. You hadn’t thought you’d been throwing that long, but you guess you lost track of time. 

You stare at your hands because it’s better than watching the clock. They’re shaking from exertion. Not nerves. You won’t allow yourself nerves. For all you know, nothing happens when the timer hits zero. 

For the first time in years, you think about your parents. Your mother, dead in a car accident when you were twenty. Your father, moved into a nursing home not long after, his health declining so hard and so fast neither of you knew what else to do about it. 

You don’t remember the last time you visited him. You doubt he ever wanted to be the father of a murderer. You hope he doesn’t keep up with blaseball anymore. If nothing else you’ve got a thing set up to wire money his way, make sure he’s being taken care of. You would check in person, but. You can't imagine that going well. You figure somebody’ll call when he’s gone for good. Then you’ll plan a funeral, you guess. Or not, depending on how the next six minutes go.

They were kind to you. Good people. Affectionate. Distant sometimes, sure, but not intentionally so. Sweet with Mike, never hinted that he should be heading home when he was sleeping in your bedroom for too many days in a row to be normal. Catholic but only by heritage, only because their parents were and their parents too, back and back for generations; they never went to church, and your mom always treated God as a kind of joke you were all in on. They took you on road trips to your grandfather’s house in the middle of nowhere by the Canadian border. They spoke Spanish enough for you to pick it up but you never spoke it back enough to feel comfortable in it. You learned the textbook version of their language in high school, didn’t take any classes in college. You don’t know how much of it still exists in you and you’re afraid to find out. 

When you told them you were a lesbian they both hugged you, then never brought it up again. When you wanted to buzz your head at sixteen Dad handed you his electric razor and a quarter-inch guard with only a _don’t tell your mom, okay, mija?_ Mom mourned the loss of your hair and you didn’t say a word. 

They taught you to walk. To cook. To drive. Helped you with your college applications, helped you move into the dorms, helped you pay tuition. You've always been independent but only because they gave you what you needed to be. Your dad promised he’d watch the first game you pitched on the TV at the nursing home. You ended up losing but he called you anyway to say he was proud, and that your mom would’ve been too. 

You miss them. You cling to what memories you have (the lullabies your mother sang, the recipes your father passed down, the day trips hiking, everything you can grasp, everything) but you're not sure you could tell someone their full names if they asked. You’re not sure you could tell someone _your_ full name—the real one, not the stupid fucking nickname you wrote down on your contract—if they asked either.

You think about the Shoe Thieves. You think about the Garages. You think about your high school exes. You think about the cats Mike gave to Teddy after you died. You think about the people you’ve killed. You think about watching their bodies turn to smoke on live TV when the cameras didn’t pan away fast enough. You can hear your pulse thundering in your ears. The clock reads three minutes. 

You think about Stu. You think about Allie, not that you’ve talked to Allie in years and not that you’ll reach out even if you do live through this. You think about Nagomi. You think about Kennedy. You think about Mike. Mike who will never forgive you; Mike who you learned to play guitar with and lived with for years and got cats with and cooked with and laughed with and even cried in front of one awful low night. Mike who’s sitting at home in your apartment and waiting to see what’ll happen next. Mike who will never forgive you but will miss you anyway.

You think about Dreamy. 

You take off your jacket and fold it on the ground next to you. You pull out your phone, open up messages. Three new. 

_Dreams 11:41PM_ _  
_

_Flight taking off now, won’t have internet_

_Text me if_

_Just text me_

Your eyes flick up to the shotclock. A minute left. 

_Hey, just in case I_

Delete. 

_It’ll probably be fine but_

Delete. 

_Don’t worry ab_

Delete. 

_Have a safe flight. I love you_

You hit send and set your phone down on the carpet beside you. Shove both it and the leather jacket further away, just in case. You pull your knees up to your chest and close your eyes tight, nails digging into your forearms. 

When you catch fire, it’s almost quick enough to be painless. 

* * *

_Dreams 4:47AM_

_I love you too_

_Sorry. I know you’re not going to see that_

* * *

You don’t remember what happens in the Hall. 

* * *

You come to on the pitcher’s mound and stagger when whatever force that had lifted you this high dissipates. You’re left off-balance and stumbling on dust as red as blood, cleat skidding over the plate as you struggle to find purchase, and the roar of the crowd deafens you. You want to clap your hands over your ears but instead you draw in a shaking breath and tilt your head so the main television camera will catch your smile. The white floodlights are bright and hot overhead. You can taste blood in your mouth, sticky and metallic. There’s a ball in your hand. Of course there’s a ball in your hand. Your trembling fingers find their place relative to the stitches. 

You burn. You come to on the pitcher’s mound. You aren’t surprised. You’re always pitching just as much as you’re always burning. 

_Rise,_ thrums something beneath you and around you and above you, some vast string being plucked. _Rise._

The world comes into focus slow. Blood trickles from both your nostrils and down your chin. Spirits surround you. People you killed and people you didn’t. None of them are alive but none of them are quite dead either. _Rise._ More materialize. 

Dark red jerseys drag themselves back to the dugout, and the crowd screams on. You start to put things together.

God laughs above you. You focus on home plate. You pitch to the catcher. This is something you know how to do. You can do this right. 

The game doesn’t feel like something you’re doing. It feels like something that’s happening to you. Mostly you hear ringing in your ears. If god is mocking you you don’t hear it. You think you’re doing something to the weather—

Reality flickers in the feedback and you’re alive again, jolted into clarity, pulse racing, breath scraping out of you as if being wrenched—

Reality flickers in the feedback and you’re dead—

Reality flickers in the feedback—

You feel like you’re being torn apart. Reality flickers in the feedback. You’re dizzy in the face of it all, this storm, this war, every pitch that connects with bat driving into you like a blow. Your ears are ringing. You wish your ears would stop ringing. Feedback wails in the sky, aches in your teeth, aches deeper than marrow, aches between your ribs. You don’t know how you’re still standing, but you are. You pitch. At least you aren’t burning. Reality flickers in the feedback—

You can see Dreamy in the Crabs’ dugout, somewhere in the huddled crush of bodies, all their arms wrapped around each other. She’s bleeding. Maybe crying too. It’s hard to tell from where you’re standing. Reality flickers in the feedback.

You don’t know what happens if you win. You don’t know what happens if you lose. Reality flickers in the feedback. You throw all the best trick pitches you know for the god’s team. Reality flickers in the feedback. You throw easy pitches for Dom, for Sebastian, for Morrow and Gloom and Yazmin and all the other dead. It doesn’t seem to make much difference but it feels good to try. Your head is pounding. 

It’s the most alive you’ve felt in— 

Reality flickers in the feedback. Reality flickers in the—

Not the scorched remains but the flame. Not the bone but the flesh. You will not die again today. 

You make eye contact with Dom where he stands adjacent to home plate. He’s panting hard, and his wide-open eyes are crazed. _Easy pitch,_ you mouth to him because you don’t have any pretty signals worked out. Just you and your funeral pyre. _Softball. Straight down the middle. Okay?_ He nods, gasping. You don’t remember throwing the pitch that killed him. You don’t think you’ll remember this one either in the end. 

The ball leaves your hand and he hits it. It cracks like gunshot against the classic wooden bat and you hear it with perfect clarity, your endless audience gone silent without warning. A clean home run hurtling straight into the outfield, into the stands, into heaven or whatever the blackened sky is calling itself now. 

The sky breaks. 

Fragments of shell fall like shrapnel and crash into the stadium which you are only now recognizing as the Crabitat. The crowd is screaming again, on their feet in the stands. 

The star players of the Hall are glowing pale blue. They’ll slip away, you think. Soon. Eternal reward. Eternal release. But you won’t be with them. Your jersey marks you as the enemy which means you get to live. Turncoat, blood spilling from your mouth and caked under your fingernails. You wonder if they’ll hate you for that. You don’t care. Their hatred doesn’t mean as much as they think it does. You bare your teeth, give any camera that might be watching you a wild red grin. 

Check your pulse, fingers pressed into the hollow of your throat hard enough to hurt. You can feel it beating there. You feel like you got hit by a fucking bus. But you’re alive. You won. 

Your throat hurts. You think maybe you’re laughing. 

“Jay?” you hear, and all your breath leaves you in a rush.

“Hey, Dreams,” you rasp, and you open your eyes, hadn’t even realized you’d had them shut. “I’m back.” She’s standing in front of you, swaying in place enough to be worrying, blood trickling lazily from the corner of her mouth. But she’s alive too. 

A strangled laugh pushes its way out of her. “Yeah, no kidding. I—” Dreamy’s eyes are wet and shining, and you shake your head, open your arms, and she folds herself in without hesitation. Her touch burns enough for you to wince—you feel like a bundle of raw nerves, skin scraped messily away—but you don’t pull away, just wait for the pain to dull. 

“Later,” you murmur into her hair, and she nods, clutching at the back of your bloodstained jersey.

You hold each other like that for a while, eyes closed. The rest of the world fades into a haze of noise and light, all swirling aimless around the two of you on the pitching mound together. 

She pulls back first but doesn’t go far, raising a hand to cradle your jaw, eyes fixed on your face. 

“Still all here, as far as I know,” you reassure her, and she snorts. 

“Wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t. You look beat to shit, babe.” 

“I hear that happens when you fight god.”

“And win,” she adds, half-smiling. 

You laugh, caught off guard. “And win, yeah.” 

“Try not to get too cocky about it,” Dreamy advises sagely. The smile’s threatening to turn into a full grin. 

“You _know_ I already am,” you complain, and she rolls her eyes and goes up on tiptoes to kiss you, little more than a brush of contact, but you lean into it anyway. You can feel her lips still curving up into a smile against yours, her hand steady and warm on your cheek, and every touch scorches against your new flesh, and you pull her closer anyway. 

* * *

Mike offers to drive you both home. It’s a short trip from the Crabs’ stadium to Dreamy’s apartment again anyway (you have never been happier to not be in Charleston), and you and her drag yourselves into the backseat while Mike starts the engine. 

He hadn’t said anything to you when you stumbled to the edge of the field, just reached out to squeeze your arm—maybe some faltering attempt at comfort, maybe just to confirm to himself that you were really there—and he doesn’t say anything now. You don’t bother to put on a seatbelt, though Dreamy does. Frankly if you die for good as a result of Mike crashing your wife’s Corolla during a fifteen minute drive home from a literal godfight you figure that’s just how it was meant to be. 

You press yourself against Sutton’s side and loop an arm around her and guide her head down to rest against your shoulder, watch the buildings pass by through the windows. It’s not an altruistic move, really; you’re holding her to comfort yourself as much as her, but still. Sutton’s clinging to your shirt so tight her knuckles have gone pale against the dark red fabric. The world blurs back into itself and you let it, focus in on her instead. 

Her eyes are open, staring straight ahead. She’s breathing the way she does when she’s trying to keep herself from losing hold completely, shallow and careful and even, too much space between each breath. Crabshell creeps slowly from her skin and you stare at it like you can force it back with your will alone. Flickering at the edges, but you’re sure that you are too. The feedback’s in you now and you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to get it out. A different kind of unreality but unreality all the same. Look at you both. A matched set. 

“Still here?” you murmur, quiet so Mike won’t hear, and she nods against your shoulder. “Good. Tell me if you need anything.” 

“I’m fine,” she says hoarsely. “Just. We won.” 

You don’t understand, smile uncertainly. “Yeah, we did.” 

“No, Jay, I mean—” She squeezes her eyes shut. “We won our third championship. We’re ascending soon.”

“Oh,” you say hollowly. Of course they did. Of course they will be. A voice in the back of your head says _maybe if_ I’d _been there—_

“Three game sweep against the Thieves,” she says. “The Shelled One’s team came down on us as soon as the game ended. Brock went up to pitch. They beat us in one hit.” She laughs bitterly. “Wasn’t a fair fight. I don’t know what happened, I was just in the outfield, but there was a shockwave and—I don’t know. The next thing I remember I was in the dugout and you were pitching.” Her voice wavers, and you rub her shoulder, press your cracked lips to her forehead. 

You wish you could feel anything other than empty exhaustion. You don’t know how many more battles you can fight and win. You don’t know how many more deaths you can die. You don’t know how many more times you can lose her. 

Eventually the car rolls to a stop. You don’t register it at first and Sutton doesn’t either; Mike has to reach back and tap you on the arm before your eyes refocus and you realize you’ve parked. 

“You two need help getting up the stairs?” he asks. “‘Cause I can stick around a little longer if you guys like.” 

You blink at him. “Where’d you be going otherwise?”

He lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “Betsy said I could crash at theirs in Seattle for a few days, and I think I’m gonna take ‘em up on it. Figured the two of you could use some time, and I was thinking about moving in with them sometime anyway.”

“Thanks, Mike,” you say, soft, and he shrugs again. 

“Least I could do. I’ll make sure you make it up the stairs without eating shit.”

You snort. “Yeah, we’ll do our best.” You nudge Dreamy with your hip and she fumbles the car door open, hands curling into fists too late for you to miss the way they’re trembling. 

The walk up the stairs is a halting one. Mike climbs a few steps behind the two of you, pausing when you pause. You and Dreamy are leaned together, her arm around your waist and yours around her shoulders. You help each other stay upright. 

Mike’s got a spare key, unlocks the door himself once you all finally reach it. Steps aside to let you walk in, expression unreadable. 

“You leaving?” 

He nods. “Yeah. I mean, I’ll stay if you want, but—”  
  


“Nah, get outta here,” you cut him off, managing a shadow of a grin, and he half-laughs but doesn’t go yet, hand still resting on the doorknob. 

For a few long seconds all he does is look at you both standing just inside the threshold, then clears his throat, eyes skittering back up to meet yours. “Glad you’re back,” he finally says, and he closes the door, and he leaves. You listen to his footsteps recede down the outside hallway. 

Sutton lets out another shaking breath, a harsh noise that resembles a sob but isn’t. “Okay. Okay.” She clears her throat, eyes falling closed for a second, and when you scan her face you can see her walls coming back up, see her piecing herself together into what she needs to be, and you want to shake her, you want to yell at her to stop, to open her eyes again, to just let you both be wrecked together, flayed and bloody, but you won’t do that. “Okay,” she repeats again, and she opens her eyes, and now her expression is nothing but determined. “What we need is sleep but we’re going to be miserable if we don’t get clean first, so we’re going to shower.” 

“Okay,” you agree, helpless. “Sure. A shower sounds good.” 

Both of you get ready in silence, heavy-limbed and clumsy. Set out clean clothes, clean towels. You undress, drop your blood-saturated jersey on the tiled bathroom floor. Catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. 

You don’t remember when your own body became foreign to you. Bruised ribs and scrapes, the tattoos scattered over your skin, the dusting of hair, the freckles, the old scars. You blink and something stutters in your chest and you’re staring at a face of bone, the skeleton’s constant smile and the martyr’s constant immolation. You blink again and it’s just a woman, naked and hunched and defeated, but you don’t recognize the look on her face. 

Dreamy lays a hand on the small of your back and you turn away from the reflection, straighten up to face her instead. You always recognize her. Even when you don’t recognize yourself. The crease between her eyebrows and the tendons of her hands and the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles and the curve of her spine and the lobelia tattoo on her wrist and the muscles in her forearms. Even exhausted, even flickering, even after two deaths and three lives and gods and flames, even after all that you’ve become and all that she’s become too: she could never be beyond recognition. 

“Water’s warm by now,” she murmurs, and you nod and step into the shower. 

The water beats down on you both, hot enough to make you hiss in pain when it hits you, and you don’t reach to dial it back, just close your eyes against the droplets and turn so that the spray covers you both. The steam feels good in your aching lungs, and you draw in deliberate breaths, hyperaware of each inhale and exhale. 

You can hear Dreamy breathing too, the catch and shudder at the end of each breath in, and she moves her hand up to the space between your shoulderblades, fingers splayed out over wet skin. She draws you in close, chest to chest in the cramped shower. 

You lean into her. Turn your forehead to press into her temple. You’re choking on the tightness in your throat, eyes stinging, and even here, after everything, it feels too vulnerable. You grit your teeth and blink hard, vision blurring in the dim light. You haven’t cried in over ten years. You didn’t think you could anymore. But here you are. 

If she’s crying too, she’s quiet about it. 

You pull her closer, rub a hand over her back. “It’s okay,” you whisper, maybe to yourself or maybe to her or maybe both. “We’re gonna be okay.” 

* * *

You don’t leave each other’s side much, those next few days. Two and a half weeks to the election and ascension, and you’re taking as much time as you can get. A lot of that’s spent recovering. Sleeping if the nightmares aren’t too bad. You hold her whenever you get the chance and whenever touch isn’t too much for one or both of you. Take turns cooking meals, low-effort stuff, whatever’ll get you both through the day. Neither of you can focus on reading or anything like that, so you talk or pass her guitar back and forth or nap or just lay together, quiet. 

Mike comes back after a week. The three of you start to pack up Dreamy’s things, put her affairs in order. Just in case. You refuse to grieve her until she’s actually gone, she deserves that much, but. Selfishly you miss her already. How could you not? These final days should be celebratory—her team took the league championship three times and you fought god and won—but you can’t even make yourself pretend. You say your goodbyes, curled up with her in bed, and she tells you it isn’t really goodbye, you can’t know for sure, but you did that fucking song and dance yourself two months ago and everyone knows how that turned out. 

It’s just not _fair._ And you didn’t expect fair, and you’d laugh outright at anybody who did, but it’s _not._ Haven’t you both done enough? Here you are, clawing your way out of the grave over and over to come home to her, and here she is, unlocking her door to let you in as the city burns, and when do you ever get to rest? 

* * *

The election results come in on a Sunday. The Crabitat’s falling apart but every team in the league piles into it. Nobody’s bothered to try and repair it after the battle because why would they? Its team’ll be gone soon anyway. No one left to play inside. 

You stand with the Crabs while the results get read out. They’re all holding hands, crabshell peeking out from between their interlocked fingers, and you hold Sutton’s hand too. The Commissioner takes the stage in center field and she squeezes once, hard. 

“Welcome,” he says. “I think congratulations are in order.” He smooths his notes out on the podium, clears his throat. “The Baltimore Crabs have been Called Up. Good luck on your journey. They will be replaced in the ILB by the Tokyo Lift.”

A ripple through the crowd— _that’s it?—_ and for a moment you almost allow yourself hope, a beautiful anticlimax, but then Kennedy starts to glow. Then Finn. Then Silvaire, and Adalberto, and Brock, and Luis, and Tot, and Forrest, and—

And they’re gone. And Sutton’s still here. 

“Oh,” she says, voice small in the sudden empty space, and you open your mouth to say something, but then the Commissioner’s speaking again. 

The Shelled One’s team gets redistributed. You’re on the Lovers now, of all fucking teams, and the Hall’s players are gone for good. According to the decree there’s a new sun now. Awesome. With any luck that’ll mean less incinerations.

Blessings roll out. Blessings roll out, and Dreamy’s on the Hawai’i Fridays now with the other Crabs who got left behind; the Fridays, the furthest team from Baltimore in the goddamn ILB except you guess the Lift. Blessings roll out, and you realize you haven’t seen Mike since last night. 

“The Garages call up Goodwin Morin,” the Commissioner announces. “Mike Townsend retreats to the shadows.” 

It’s almost funny that this game still manages to surprise you. 

* * *

When you get home that night, Dreamy falls apart. 

She tries to keep herself together maybe for your sake or maybe just for her own sanity, but she ends up lying on her side on the bed, knees tucked to her chest, eyes shut. Not panicking, as far as you can tell, but not saying anything either, and when you try to lay a hand on her shoulder, talk to her, even sit down on the mattress beside her for company, she just shakes her head. And you’re not stupid, you _know_ there’s nothing you can do to really help, but she won’t even let you _try—_

“Can you leave me alone?” she asks softly after you stand there for another minute, uncertain. There’s no bitterness in the words but something twists in your stomach anyway. “Shut the door.” She hasn’t even opened her eyes, and when you don’t move, she adds, “Please, Jay. I want to be alone,” her voice thin and wavering. 

“But what if you—” 

“I’ll call you if I need something,” she says, and you don’t know if you believe her. You’re thinking about carcinization, about fading away to nothing, about crabshell forming over skin and intangibility, but you’re mostly thinking about being there to _comfort your fucking wife,_ because that’s what you’re pretty sure you’re supposed to do in this situation, but then she repeats, “Please,” and she just sounds exhausted and all you can do is walk away and shut the door behind you. 

Sutton waits until you’re gone to start crying. You shouldn’t be listening through the door anyway, and she’s trying to stay quiet, but. 

You try not to linger. You fill up a glass with cold water and cut up some plums for when she’s ready for them. 

After some time spent staring at the kitchen floor, you blink. Remember. Start to pack up Mike’s stuff. Strip the sheets off the couch, the pillows, the quilt. His suitcase and backpack are already gone; you guess he took them with him, wherever it is he went. He left his guitar. He didn’t leave a note. 

You sit crosslegged on the floor and consider playing the guitar but you don’t. You listen for any noise from the bedroom but you can’t hear anything. You wait. 

You kind of wish you had any kind of theatrics in you right now. You’d like to fall to the floor, slam your fists into walls, scream out the window into the streets. Cinematic breakdown. Catharsis. That’s what tragedies are for, right? Instead you’re thinking about how you’re probably going to have to get a place in San Francisco. Rent’s supposed to suck there but it’s not like you don’t have the money. It’s just the decision. Where to live. You never liked the Bay Area much. You fucking especially don’t like the Lovers much. You wonder if Knight Triumphant would die if you tore out his throat. 

But mostly you wait. 

* * *

The worst thing is that Dreamy keeps trying to fix things. She keeps trying to be in control of the situation, keeps trying to ask how you’re doing and comfort you, keeps offering to take care of meals. And you’re not trying to treat her like an invalid or anything but God, this can’t be healthy. You’d seen it in her before, the way she’d shape herself into whatever was needed, but you hadn’t thought—

It shouldn’t have gotten this far. That’s all you can think. It should never have gone as far as it did. You should’ve known. You should’ve insisted on taking care of her more often. You should’ve. Something. Not this. 

When she’s up to leaving the house, you go on walks together. Hold hands in the street. You avoid the Bay and don’t say anything about it and she doesn’t either. When she isn’t up to leaving the house, you stay with her. You’re sure you aren’t being as subtle about it as you could be, but whatever, you’re fuckin’ trying. When she can handle being touched and wants to be held, you hold her. When she can’t or doesn’t, you do whatever else you can instead. 

If you lay it out like that it’s simple. It makes sense. You want it to make sense like that. You want there to be a right way through this. You want a straight road and an exit sign. 

You don’t ask if the two of you are going to move out of Baltimore. It’s not even a question. Of course you’ll stay.

* * *

The season starts again before either of you are ready, but then again when doesn’t it? 

It’s just training at first. You get acquainted with your new team. You like NaN—you can appreciate a vaguely ominous fucked up glitchy little guy—and you even like Kichiro. She’s kind of a bitch but in a fun way, and she and Dreamy have been friends for years, and she helps you get a place in Berkeley, inconveniently far from the Lovers’ stadium but a five minute walk from her place. You tolerate the rest. You refrain from ripping out Knight’s throat with your bare teeth for what he did to Sutton, miracle of miracles. You pitch. You’re the best on the team, dull satisfaction that that is. 

Dreamy goes to Hawai’i. Nagomi and Montgomery were left behind too, so if nothing else she’s not alone. It’s still miserable. You both try to make it back to Baltimore as much as you can, but it’s sinking in that you’re going to have to do long-distance again once the season starts, which you were never really suited for even before you both suffered unspeakable traumas. She looks so tired. You feel about the same. Neither of you sleep much regardless. 

One night, you jerk awake to empty arms and an empty bed, pulse thundering in your ears. “Dreams?” you say, hushed. “You there?”

You slide out of bed, pull a hoodie on over your t-shirt and shorts, and try to keep your breathing from getting too quick. The room’s dark but your eyes are adjusting, and she isn’t here. 

Then, down the hall, you hear guitar. Soft, like she was trying not to wake you up with it. 

You push the bedroom door open, and she must hear the creak of the hinges because the playing stops all at once. 

“Jay?” Dreamy calls from the living room, voice still sleep-raspy, and you go out to meet her. 

She’s sitting on the floor, back pressed to the couch, her guitar in her hands. It’s a nice instrument. Sturdy pale wood, unscathed pickguard, a good rich sound quality. Her head is dropped low, and she only looks up when you sit down next to her. 

“Couldn’t sleep,” she mumbles. In the streetlights coming in through the window, you can see the bags under her eyes. “Nightmares.” 

“You can always get me up for that kind of thing,” you offer quietly. 

Dreamy shakes her head. “No, ‘s fine, babe. You were sleeping.” 

“I don’t mind,” you insist. 

A sigh as she leans against your side. “I didn’t want you to have to wake up and deal with—” 

“Better than waking up to an empty bed. That scared the shit out of me.” You say it as gently as you can manage, but her face crumples anyway, just for a moment. 

“Sorry,” she whispers. “I wasn’t thinking about… I just didn’t want you to worry.” 

“It’s okay if you need space, seriously. I just—didn’t know where you were.”

She wrinkles her nose at you. “I know it’s okay.” 

“I know you know. But.” 

Another sigh, this one sharper, and Sutton rubs at her forearm, palm scraping over ridges of chitin that haven’t receded yet. “It just feels stupid to wake you up about this kind of thing. You’re the one who died twice. I’m just.” She gestures vaguely at herself. 

You shrug. “You spent, like, four years minimum in a state of hypervigilance and then lost almost your entire team, and even if you hadn’t, I think everyone deserves a good nervous breakdown.” 

She snorts. “Still.” 

You don’t bother to argue, just sigh and open an arm and she scoots closer, tucks herself against your side, lifting the fretboard so it doesn’t bump into your knees. 

“What were you playing before?” you ask, and she shrugs. 

“Dunno. Just wanted to fingerpick a little. The repetition’s nice.” 

“Sounded melancholy as hell, whatever it was.” 

“Not my fault A minor’s a pretty chord,” she says, obstinate. “I wasn’t just sitting there trying to be depressing,” and you laugh, quiet in the dim. 

“You can keep playing,” you add. “If you want.” 

“You don’t mind?” 

You shake your head, chin brushing against her hair. “I like hearing you play. Plus I don’t think I’m gonna go back to sleep anyway.”

“Nightmares for you too?” she asks, fingers forming back into chords on the fretboard. 

“Sure, but what else is new?” Same shit as always. Burning on the pitching mound at the end of season one. Burning in the Thieves’ clubhouse at the end of season ten. Burning, always. 

Sometimes it’s Sutton burning instead. In your living room and in the bed you share and in the stadium and in your arms. Those dreams are worse than the usual and waking up without her after one of them is even more so. By now, everywhere you’ve ever been has become the site of her death. 

She hums, half in acknowledgment and half in tune with the melody she’s picking out, but doesn’t say anything. You don’t mind. You rest your head on hers, and you listen to her play. 

* * *

The season starts three days later. You don’t see each other much after that.

* * *

You’re in two different subleagues, that’s the issue, barely ever even in the same fucking time zone much less the same city. She doesn’t have the free time to go back to Baltimore or your place in San Francisco and you can’t just fly to Honolulu every time you want to see her. 

So you make do. You call her whenever you get the chance and talk for as long a time as you can both carve out of your days. There’s a strange déjà vu to it. You don’t have to cram yourself into a phonebooth whenever you talk to her anymore, but you miss it, in a weird way, that lighthearted inconvenience. 

You liked hunting around your hotel for a payphone in unfamiliar cities, liked complaining about how much it was costing you in pocket change, liked shoving yourself into the corner of the booth and listening to the smile in her voice through the shitty audio. Liked feeling as though you were getting away with something stupid and thrilling and secret, something belonging only to the two of you. 

These days you call her from a single hotel room or the fenced-off back porch of your new house. You don’t like how people stare when you go out in public. 

(You’d showed her the house the last day of the hiatus, just before her connecting flight from SFO to HNL. She took it all in from the foyer: the modern architecture, the paintings hanging on the walls, the big leafy houseplants, the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city, the skylight and the sun streaming in through it. You stood back a little, hands in your pockets, and waited. 

“I hate it here,” she said flatly. 

You laughed. “Oh thank God. Me too.”)

Sometimes your schedule works out well enough that you can hang back in a city for an extra day and wait for the Fridays to show up to play, steal a couple hours or even a full night with her. Or you can fly out early to catch her before her team leaves for the next series. It takes some serious fucking coordination and more attention paid to the game schedule than you ever bothered with before and it never feels like enough, but it’s worth it. Of course it’s worth it. It’s her. 

* * *

During a phone call:

“What do you want done with your body after you die?”

You arch an eyebrow that she can’t see. “What, assuming I don’t just get fuckin’ incinerated again?"

“I mean, yeah,” she says, dry. “Obviously.” 

“I dunno. I hadn’t really thought about it.” You hadn’t even really entertained the thought that this would ever end. “Natural burial, I guess?” 

“Not cremation?”

“I tried cremation twice, babe. Did not care for that shit at _all.”_

“To be fair, I’m pretty sure that the point of regular cremation is that you’re already extremely dead.”

You shift on your feet, stare out the big window with your thumb hooked into your jean pocket. “Sure, but. Still. I don’t know.”  
  


“I’m with you on natural burial,” she said. “I like that it’s so clear as an end. Undeniably finite in its slowness. Incineration just feels like a—a disappearing act, you know? A bad magic trick. Like any second you’re going to rematerialize and go _‘ha! got you! I’ve been here all along!’_ except you never do.” 

“That didn’t sound like a general ‘you’ there.”

She chuckles ruefully. “Guess it wasn’t, no. Though I guess you did materialize in the end.” 

A brief pause. 

“But natural burial?” you prompt.

Dreamy exhales. “Yeah. Our bodies side by side. They can plant an apple tree on top of us or something. The idea of decomposing used to freak me out, but. Like I said, I like solidity of it. Evidence, you know? That we were here, and also that we’re gone now.” 

“Sure,” you say. “Our skeletons can hold hands and shit.”  
  


She laughs. “Romantic.”

“It _is!”_ you insist, meaning it, and she laughs again, but it’s fond. You hesitate, chewing your lip, then decide to just say it: “D’you really think we’re gonna get to have that?” 

Dreamy’s silent for a little while, and you’d think she’d hung up if not for the distant sounds of waves crashing; she must be near a beach. 

“I was just wondering, that’s all,” she says. “If we do, I don’t think I’d mind that so much.” 

* * *

She never calls you when she’s panicking. She says she doesn’t like the vulnerability. Doesn’t like breaking where other people can see it. She likes to deal with it herself. You’re just there to bring her back down after. Keep her company. Keep her grounded. 

It’s fine. You trust her. You know she can take care of herself. You just wish you could take care of her too. 

She says that you are, just by doing this. But it doesn’t feel—

* * *

Another phone call: 

“I’ve stopped carcinizing. When I’m—you know.” Her voice has that quality to it, the ragged edge that you know means she was crying. 

“Is that—how d’you feel about that?” you try. 

She chuckles roughly. “What are you, my fucking therapist?”

“You definitely don’t have a therapist.” 

“Yeah, well. Touché, or whatever.” She breathes out hard. “And, uh, bad. I feel—bad about that.” A weak laugh. “Is it weird to say I miss it? I miss feeling connected to the city and connected to them. I miss _them,_ full stop. I miss the armor. Miss feeling—I don’t know. Whatever. And don’t say you’re sorry about it; I swear to God I’ll fly down to San Francisco just to kick your ass myself.” 

You snort. “You promise?”

“Jay,” she says, and you imagine the smile tugging her lips sideways. 

“We should try and meet in person again or FaceTime or something soon. I miss seeing your face.” 

“You sap. Don’t let the tabloids overhear that, they’ll go batshit over you again.” 

“When _aren’t_ they going batshit over me,” you complain. “God forbid I ever miss my wife.”

“God forbid,” she echoes wryly, and you roll onto your back, stare up at the popcorn ceiling of the hotel room. Two of your fingers come up to rest on your throat before you realize what you’re doing and shake your hand out, lay it palmdown and flat on the sheets.

“I can stop saying it if you want,” you tell her. 

“What, the wife thing or the missing me thing?”

“Both. Either. I dunno, I guess.” 

“Don’t stop saying it,” she says immediately, quiet and just a little guilty. “Please.” 

* * *

Another:

“Soo, how’s the team?”

“Shut up.”

* * *

No deaths this season. It is, to say the least, a fucking anomaly. There aren’t any eyes in this hurricane, you know that, but it’s hard not to feel like this is one of them anyway. A long siesta’s been announced, starting at the end of this season. They don’t say how long it’ll last. Minimum four years. Which is. You aren’t thinking about it. 

There’s the threat of the new god. There’s the threat of the ground dropping out from under you the way it never fails to. There’s always a threat. There has to be. You don’t know what to do if the world isn’t ending. 

* * *

The Lovers don’t make it to the playoffs, and the Fridays don’t either. It’s the first time you and Dreamy haven’t qualified for the postseason in years. You pitch your last game on day ninety-six, and then it’s a three-day series against the Fridays. 

Dreamy’s team flies in the night before the series starts and you meet her at SFO, blaseball cap pulled down low over your forehead and stupid oversized celebrity sunglasses shoved over your eyes. She recognizes you anyway, beaming from across the massive room and waving, and you wave back. 

She hurries across the terminal and you put your hands in your pockets and wait where you are, but you can’t keep yourself from grinning like an idiot. Sutton doesn’t hesitate before throwing herself into your arms, suitcase abandoned behind her, and you crush her to your chest, chin hooked over her shoulder. 

You turn your head to murmur a “Missed you,” into her ear, and she laughs and pulls back to kiss you, short and a little off-center, but you smile into it anyway. 

“Missed you too,” she says, breaking away just enough to lean her forehead against yours. 

You drive her back to your place, and she instinctively wrinkles her nose upon seeing your house again (“Can I say I hate the paintings? Is that allowed?” “Sure. Some interior designer chose ‘em, not me.” “They should be fired.”) but still tugs you into another kiss the second you’re in the door.

It feels like a luxury, getting to have this with her again. It kind of always did, honestly, but especially now. Falling asleep with her in your arms, her bare skin against yours. You end up making both of you a little late to the game the next morning, but she doesn’t even pretend to be annoyed about it. 

(“How’d you sleep?” you ask, stirring sugar into her coffee, and she grins from where she’s perched on the kitchen counter in one of your shirts, more content and self-satisfied than you’ve seen her in months. 

“Better,” she says. “Always better with you.”) 

The Fridays win two of the three games against the Lovers, following the long-standing tradition of her team being annoyingly better than yours, and then that’s it. Regular season’s over. You say goodbye to Kichiro and NaN, pack most of your stuff up, and fly back to Baltimore, easy as that. 

It’s good to be back in the apartment in Baltimore. Sure, it’s cramped, and it’s full of reminders of how things used to be before you died twice and the Crabs ascended and Mike left, and there aren’t exactly any stunning city views. But there are photos on the wall, and paintings Sutton actually likes, and the bookshelves are full of books, and the evening sun comes in gold through the kitchen window. And she’s there. 

* * *

Together, you watch the neverending postseason on TV from the apartment. Same with the election results. None of the blessings this year are deadly—it’s just some inscrutable tarot-themed shit, which was always more Kennedy’s or Kichiro’s type of thing than it was yours or Dreamy’s—and neither of you feel any real connection with your team anyway. What are they gonna do about it, incinerate you? 

The broadcast of the election results ends and they throw to the splorts analysts, so Dreamy reaches over to the remote on the end table and switches it off, then sighs softly and turns to drape both arms over your shoulders, head buried in the crook of your neck. 

“You alright?”

“Yeah, ‘m good,” she mumbles. “Just was hoping the Crabs’d come back somehow. I don’t know why.” 

You’d gone to the Telescope together the other night, just to see how they were doing. One win, ninety-eight losses. You had the whole observatory to yourselves, your loosely-joined hands hanging between you. 

(“You got a favorite constellation, Dreams?”

“Yeah. Cancer.” 

“The crab one?”  
  


“Shut up, I know. It’s just that it’s one of the only constellations I actually know how to find. Silvaire was really into astrology, it was her pregame ritual and everything, and she showed us all how to pick it out at some point. Before w—before they ascended. She said we should all know our own constellation.” 

“Where is it? You should show me.”

“Oh, it’s. Um. You can’t see it in Baltimore. Or in any city, really. It isn’t bright enough.”)

It doesn’t seem like they’re coming back anytime soon. They’re starting to build—something, at the Crabitat. Hard to say what. You can tell Dreamy’s trying not to worry about it too much, but it goes against her nature not to worry. 

“I guess I just—I told myself I could deal with the Fridays. As long as I thought of them as a one-season interim between going back to Baltimore, it was—it was okay, you know? I mean, they’re not all bad. I like Harrell. I like Nagomi and Moco.” 

“Two of the three people you just named were Crabs,” you note. 

She groans. “Yeah, well. That’s who I like. I just… the Fridays’ whole thing with the good vibes. I _can’t,_ Jay, that’s not me. I can’t—go with the flow, or whatever. I have to—” 

“Question everything,” you say, half-grinning. “Yeah.” 

An aggrieved sigh against your collarbone. “They really knew what they were talking about with those pregame rituals, huh.”

“Yeah, they got you there.” 

* * *

Siesta starts without any fanfare. You’re sure plenty of people are throwing parties, and there’s always the mandatory end-of-season gala, but those almost seem like afterthoughts. And sure, whoever’s making the decisions for the League is hinting at some kind of special event tournament, one game a year, but for now you’re not worrying about that. You’re just—done, for the time being. It’s weird. Not having anything coming next. You don’t know what to do with yourself. 

You consider applying for a job, just to fill up your time, then remember you’ve committed twelve felonies regardless of whether you’ve been prosecuted for them or not. The legal immunity of being a blaseball star is a hell of a drug. Doesn’t make you any more hirable, though. 

So, mostly, you laze around the house. Keep doing most of the cooking and cleaning just so you have something to do with your hands, but that doesn’t take too much of your time. Especially now that it’s just you and Sutton. 

It’s the boredom that really gets to you. Not that you had much purpose in blaseball either, honestly, but at least then you knew what you supposed to do: pitch the ball. Win the games. You weren’t good for much else. 

Dreamy—

“D’you think we should move out of Baltimore?” you finally ask after turning it over in your head for months, and even from across the couch you can see how she stiffens. “Not permanently,” you hurry to add. “I mean, I wouldn’t wanna sell the apartment or anything. I know this is always going to be home. But.” 

But this city is too full of ghosts for her. Dreamy spent over a decade here with people she loved so fiercely, and they’re gone now. She can’t walk to the grocery store without passing by somewhere with a memory attached. 

“Where would we even go?”

“Dunno. Away. Somewhere rural.” 

She snorts. “What, like a farm?”

“I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life and I’m not gonna start now. No, not a farm. Just, like, a house. In a small town. We can get to know our neighbors. Plant a garden. Shit like that.” 

Dreamy pauses, fidgets with the hem of her shirt. “Can we get some chickens?”

“Sure, we can get chickens. A cat too, if you want.” 

She cracks a grin. “We’re straying dangerously close to _Of-Mice-And-Men-_ dialogue territory here.” 

You roll your eyes but still laugh, letting her deflect. “Don’t _ruin_ it, Dreams.” 

The conversation moves on after that, but you hope she thinks about it. 

* * *

It takes her a while but she brings it up again a year after the hiatus started, when there’s still no news about when the game’s coming back. She’s getting antsy too now. Still doesn’t sleep much. You don’t either. You don’t know if the nightmares ever leave. 

(In a truly shocking show of emotional intelligence, you’ve both gone and gotten yourselves therapists, but. That only does so much. And it’s not like blaseball trauma psychology is a developed medical field. You _do_ probably win the reward for World’s Uniquest Trauma, though, which feels like a plus.)

“Are you still thinking about us moving out?” She asks it while you’re working on dinner together. You’re making arroz con pollo, just waiting for it to cook. Not much to do but talk. 

Her tone’s all feigned casualness, but you don’t call her on it. “Yeah. You?”  
  


“It sounds nice,” she admits, leaning back against the counter. “As long as it’s not forever.”  
  
You briefly consider saying some horrible annoying cryptic bullshit that misses the point entirely, like _well,_ nothing’s _forever, babe,_ then decide not to and mentally congratulate yourself for it. “Yeah, ‘course not. It’d just be somewhere to go for as long as the hiatus lasts. I’m tired of getting recognized at the grocery store.” 

“What would you do that’d be any different? I mean, I can’t imagine the hiring prospects are going to be any better for you no matter where we go.”

“I dunno. If we buy a real piece of shit house I can fix it up or something. Not a _job_ job, but it’d be something.” 

Dreamy laughs. “Home improvement? Really, Jay? That’s the midlife crisis hobby you’re going with?” 

“I’ve gotta do _something,”_ you complain. “Seriously, I’m gonna go fuckin’ insane. There’s only so many times I can fix the silverware drawer before I start wishing the house would break down in more interesting ways.”  
  


“I think that’s literally only a you problem,” she informs you. “Like, I’ve never heard of that being a thing.”  
  


“It’s cute of me,” you insist.

She snorts, then sighs and waves a hand. “Alright, fine, let’s go fuck off to Maine or whatever.” 

_“Fuck_ yeah!” you exclaim, pumping your fist, and, laughing, she crosses the kitchen to kiss you. 

* * *

Getting stuff in order enough to move doesn’t take too much time, surprisingly. You’re gone in a couple weeks. 

You almost make a joke about U-Hlauling lesbians as Baltimore disappears in the rearview mirror, then remember you’ve been together for over ten years at this point if you count the time you were dead, and focus on driving instead.  
  


The trip itself is kind of awful. You always hated driving in big cities, and you’re going through the worst of them to get up to northern New Hampshire. Traffic sucks. Navigation sucks. You still agree to drive the whole way. 

You being you, you’ve got a road trip playlist, but you and Dreamy mostly end up talking over it. Which is fine, because her being her, she’d bully you relentlessly for your taste in music even though she likes most of the same stuff anyway. 

Somewhere in Massachusetts, she falls asleep in the passenger seat. You drive a little more carefully after that, turn down the music, take the turns slower, swerve to avoid potholes. You keep catching yourself looking over at her sleeping face without even meaning to. 

She wakes up around Concord and stares at you with bleary disdain when you immediately crank up the volume again but still agrees to help out with directions. You even printed out a map for this like a real person, and she traces her finger over the route you Sharpie’d in, squinting through the dying light to parse it. 

“Would it have killed you to use Google maps?” she gripes. 

“The internet woulda gone out before we got there!” you defend, and she glares when you take a curve too fast, grabbing onto the safety handle. “Plus, this is fun. Like an adventure.” 

“We’re absolutely going to get lost.” 

“We aren’t gonna get lost, babe.” 

You get lost. 

But it’s _fine,_ okay, because you find your way back to the main road and then to the indistinguishable gravel one-lane path you were supposed to be on in the first place, and then you’re at the house. 

It is, as advertised, a real piece of shit house. The exterior paint job is terrible, and the steps up to the front porch are partially collapsed, and one of the windows is busted, and it’s tiny, and it’s probably eight other different kinds of hazardous that you just can’t see because sun went down hours ago. You get why nobody’s moved in for a good few decades. 

“I’ve literally never seen a house look more haunted,” Dreamy says.

“Right? Home sweet home!” you say, grinning, and turn off the car and make your way to the front door. 

* * *

You get to work. And it is work—actual real work that you do every day instead of one out of every four or five, and it makes your whole body ache instead of just your pitching arm. It turns out you don’t know _shit_ about houses. You have never once in your life fixed a busted pipe or painted an exterior wall or replaced floorboards. You rely on your scattered neighbors and Wlikihow and trial and error. Mostly you fuck up and spend twice as long fixing things as you should’ve had to. 

You don’t mind so much. Nobody recognizes you out here and if they do, they don’t say anything about it. You buy a little portable radio, set it up to play next to you while you fix the front steps. Dreamy gets a part-time job in the nearby town because she’s actually hirable. Starts teaching beginner’s-level art classes at the community center. Exercise classes too. She’s in and out of the house, and you keep working. 

There’s always something. The stain on the ceiling, or the carpet ugly enough that you have to rip it up completely within the first week of moving in, or the chipping paint, or the rotting wooden porch, or the leaking faucet in the bathroom. Every time you fix one problem with the house another appears in its place, but it doesn’t feel—futile, you guess. You feel like you’re going somewhere in a way you never did before. You test your weight on the porch swing and the new chain holding it up doesn’t snap and you grin. 

* * *

The day after you move in, you and Sutton go shopping for furniture together. A couch, a dining room table, a couple chairs in case you want to have someone over for dinner. You argue about interior design, and she’s right about most things—artist’s eye—but you’re right about others, and you even manage not to be too smug about it. You don’t have anything to prove to her anyway and she doesn’t either. 

You hang the curtains together, bicker about which wall the sofa should be against even though you thought you’d agreed on that back at the store, finally frame old photos. She helps you build the planter boxes for a vegetable garden even though your neighbor ten minutes down the street, Shaun, has to lend you most of the tools for that. He’s like that.

(“Hey, can you come over? Our entire backyard fucking _flooded.”_

“Yeah. Happens nearly every February ‘round here. There’s a reason most of the houses are a little raised up off the ground. You surprised or something?”

Or: 

“Our rooster’s being mean to our hens, what do w—”

“Make him into stew. Seriously.” 

“Dude, I’m not killing my rooster, what’s wrong with you?” 

“Give him to me and Delilah then.” 

Or: 

“Okay, fine, I give up, how the hell do I redo grout?”

“How’d you fuck up this time?” 

Et cetera. 

Shaun’s a good-natured guy, short and heavyset with a truly impressive beard, and he only makes fun of you and Dreamy for being city slickers when it’s warranted. Which is admittedly frequent.)

* * *

One afternoon, you’re repainting the windowsills when Shaun’s tween daughter Madeleine shows up on foot with a box full of kittens. 

“Rye had kittens,” Maddie explains unnecessarily. “You guys want one?” 

You and Sutton pick out a tortoiseshell kitten together, mostly grey with patches of orange tabby, and name her Sunflower. You’d always been more of a dog person, but you don’t know when the siesta’s gonna end, and Sutton’s apartment never allowed dogs anyway, and you don’t want to raise a dog just to give it away as soon as the next season starts. 

Plus, Sunflower’s a sweet cat. Spoiled as hell, wakes you up at six a.m. meowing insistently to be fed, won’t stay off the damn counters when you’re cooking, but sweet. Dreamy’s her favorite by far, too, so you can’t really fault her taste. Anytime Dreamy sits still for too long Sunflower ends up curled in her lap, purring up a storm. Sometimes the domesticity of it all really does hit you like a fucking brick. 

* * *

“The hens didn’t lay today. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” 

Dreamy squints at you over her morning tea. _“This_ is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” 

“By far.” 

“Oh no. Poor you. We’ll have to sell the house. We’re never going to make it through the winter like this. I can’t believe w—” 

“Fine, fine, point taken.”

“Go to the store! Buy eggs! You’re a multimillionaire!” 

You wrinkle your nose. “Only if you come with me.” 

She sighs, gets up from the table, and leans up to kiss you on the cheek before heading for the front door. “Yeah, alright, just let me put on my coat.” 

* * *

It’s an impossible line to ride. You know this is temporary. You know you can’t stay here forever. You’ll never grow old; you’ll never watch your hair go grey in the mirror morning by morning; you’ll never see laugh lines appear on Dreamy’s face. There’s no reality where you just get to live out the rest of your life like this, rebuilding this house from its bones, watching the sun go down from the porch with Dreamy on warm summer nights. There’s no reality where your life is your own. There’s no reality where the two of you are just the nice married girls down the street instead of—whatever you’ve become. 

You know this is temporary, but if you think of it like that for too long you’ll lose your mind. So you let down your guard. You put down roots. You invite Shaun and Delilah and Maddie over for dinner on Friday nights. Dreamy makes friends with some of her students and invites them over too. Kichiro comes to stay every once in a while. So does Nagomi. The sun rises, and you wake up with Sunflower curled between you. Go on morning runs along the road through the woods. She gets better at art and singing and letting you help her when she needs it. You get better at repairing things and talking and being a person. You both get better at guitar, at cooking, at loving each other. The two of you argue still sometimes, sure. You’re still you, and she’s still her, and there’s always something to argue about. That’s life. But you never really fight, and you always work it out, too. 

Some nights, you sit on the newly-fixed roof and look at the stars. Dreamy points out Cancer to you every spring, when it’s brightest. You try to remember the constellations your grandfather taught you decades ago now. You wish on shooting stars, and almost every time you wish for one more year with her. 

* * *

_This will end,_ you remind yourself. _This will end._

* * *

In the meantime you can watch Maddie grow up. You can look at her, and you can think _this is the age I was when I met Mike._ Then, _this is the age I was when I started high school._ And _this is the age I was when I tried out for the blasketball team. This is the age I was when I came out to my parents. This is the age I was when I got my first girlfriend. This is the age I was when I applied to college. This is the age I was when I got my first job. This is the age I was when I started dating Allie. This is the age I was when Mike and I moved in together. This is the age I was when I first heard about blaseball. This is the age I was when I won my first game. This is the age I was when I met my wife. This is the age I was when I died._

There isn’t anything after that. But Maddie keeps living, and so do you. You still haven’t aged a day. You are perpetually just-past-twenty-seven, perpetually winding up on the mound to throw your first pitch. If you believed in fate, you’d say yours was sealed as soon as the ball left your hand, but you don’t. 

* * *

Eighteen years. When all is said and done, you get eighteen years together. 

The announcement comes after almost a half decade of radio silence, nothing since the Coffee Cup. You’d been surprised at how much you missed blaseball, in the abstract. You don’t miss it now. 

When Dreamy comes home from work, she finds you hurling balls at the side of the house, ruining a paint job from five years ago. Your form is still perfect. You had hoped it would decay without practice, but. You hit the same place on the wall every time, over and over. 

There are dark clouds gathering overhead, a sickly warm wind blowing through the trees that surround the house. Rain’s coming. 

“Jay, stop it,” she says, sharp, and you throw one last pitch before turning to her, breathing hard. 

“It’s coming back,” you say. 

“Yeah. I heard.” Dreamy takes a hesitant step toward you and you breathe out hard before walking to stand at her side, work boots crunching in the gravel. You know you have time but you still try to recommit her face to memory on instinct, here and now. Soon you’ll be going months without seeing her again.

The wind whips your hair into your face. “What now?” 

“I don’t know. We’ve got three years. That’s not nothing. We’ll still get to go to Maddie’s wedding." 

“Yeah.” You pause, and she doesn’t say anything. “We’re gonna have to sell the chickens, though. Before the time’s up. I figure we can still stay here during the siestas if we want. But.”

“Not now,” she says quietly, and you nod. Tilt your head back to look up at the sky, and she follows your gaze.

Your hand finds hers, and you watch the storm roll in together. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you endlessly for reading, it really means the world to me! you can find me @fourteenthidol on tumblr if you want to talk, and if you left a comment i would deeply appreciate it! thanks again <33


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